Farm to Fork to Fertilizer: New Course Takes Salad Greens Full Circle
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Emily McKeen ’14, a student in the Food Production Field Experience course, harvests greens grown by the class for the UNH Dairy Bar restaurant. |
Order a salad at UNH’s popular Dairy Bar restaurant, and you join a closed loop of sustainability: The greens were grown on campus, less than a mile away, by students in the sustainable agriculture and food systems major. And that salad got its start in compost created from food waste from the Dairy Bar and other university dining facilities.
The course, Food Production Field Experience, borrows from the structure of community supported agriculture for its 20
“We’re learning a lot about transplants, seedlings, greenhouse management, irrigation, and soil,” said Emily McKeen ’14, a sustainable agriculture and food systems major from Plymouth, Mass., as she harvested leaf lettuce and mustard greens recently. “The hands-on experience definitely helps me remember it all.”
Two new high tunnels growing greens for the UNH Dairy Bar are classrooms for the Food Production Field Experience class. |
Several times each week, those vegetables – for now a mix of leafy greens, spinach, and kale plus other cold-tolerant crops like radishes and carrots – are delivered to the course’s primary customer, the Dairy Bar. The restaurant, operated by UNH’s Dining Services in a historic train station (Amtrak’s Downeaster train still makes five stops a day), focuses on fresh, local, sustainable dining, making it an ideal outlet for the fruits and vegetables of the students’ labors.
“We’re getting the freshest product possible,” says Jon Plodzik, director of Dining Services, “and we’re teaching a whole generation how to harvest and grow greens year-round right here in New Hampshire, which is really exciting.”
Closing the loop, food scraps from the Dairy Bar and all UNH dining facilities go to the university’s composting operation several miles away on Kingman Farm. Once the waste becomes rich, nutritive compost, it returns to the high tunnels to help grow the next crop of greens or, as the weather warms and days lengthen, summer crops like tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and peppers.
To Ogden, who works closely with horticultural production coordinator Jake Uretsky ’12G, UNH provides the ideal environment for this full circle of sustainability education, food, and practices. “We have this unique combination of an administration that’s very much in favor of all this, a
The new course and the new facilities are the result of a collaborative effort between the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, the New Hampshire Agriculture Experiment Station, UNH Dining Services, and the Tuttle Foundation.
Originally published by:
UNH Today
Photography by Beth Potier, UNH Media Relations
No comments:
Post a Comment