by Sophia Chiparus
Hi!!!
It’s been a pretty blah week, on many fronts. But as I write to you today, I feel a really sweet sense of light and happiness. This is the second to last email you will receive from me this year, as we close in on the end of this program!
Obviously, I’ve been pretty involved with the farm and its happenings this year. It’s somewhat surreal to know that next year, this program will run again, and it’s very likely I will have no part in it, maybe nowhere near this place I’ve grown so familiar with. But I’ll save more of my sentimentalities for the final week’s email.
This week, I wanted to interview someone that shockingly, I have yet to. When it comes to the farm, no one knows more than our farm manager, Chris Adair. I had a couple of questions for him, about this year, the next, and what the farm means to him. I hope you enjoy hearing from him:
Who are you, and how long have you been working at the student farm?
I am Chris Adair the Purdue Student farm manager. I’ve been working here for over 10 years as of April.
Chris (right) and his brother Alex.
Talk a bit about the CSA program, how it came to be and how it has changed ?
It started because of Covid. We used to sell to the dining halls but lost that sales outlets when they shut down during Covid. We decided to advertise and try a week to week CSA fro the season and we averaged about 15-20 people a week for about 10 weeks, and we figured that was enough interest to run a more robust program the next season. We launched it hoping for 50 signups and ended up with 78 for the first official year. It grew into a program where the last two years we had about 150 participants in the program and then this year we did have a slight drop to around 135.
How has the CSA shaped the farm and its activities?
It has the biggest impact on how we harvest. We’re harvesting so things are ready on a weekly basis. We stay cognizant of the fact that overharvesting can cause issues down the line in following weeks in terms of crop availability.
It puts a focus on Fridays, with packing the bags and actually doing the pickup. That in of itself shapes how and when the students work and what they do. A lot of the mid-summer through fall semester work revolves around harvesting and prepping for the CSA, which doesn’t always leave a lot of time for other activities.
At this point in the season, things like pruning our tomatoes get left behind as the effort won’t pay off anymore. We couldn’t stop pruning on week 6 without experiencing a huge hit to later production, but when we get to a further point in the season, we are just trying to get as many fruits out of the tunnel as possible with less concern for the longevity of production.
A Monarch butterfly in the wetland
We’ve had a pretty robust year for peppers. Do you want to speak on why?
In general, our site and the soil type is conducive to growing peppers. The heavy soil holds the water well and has good nutrition, so peppers do really well. We also added a research project this year that more than doubled the amount of sweet bell pepper plants we grew this year. Also, peppers are highly diverse, from sweets to hots to super hots, so it’s a good crop to grow a variety of. We hope the diversity between varieties alleviates some of the sameness of having so many peppers
How connected is the student farm to the Purdue community? How did it come to be this way?
A number of our connections to groups and people come through the classes that spend time on the farm. We get many undergrads out here through that. Through the internship we get students who are mainly from Horticulture and Landscape Architecture but also from different departments. Through research we have a number of different projects that range from weed suppression to variety trials to insect population and tracking. There are two student clubs that meet out here as well, Purdue Student Farm Organization and the Bee Club. All five cultural centers participate in the CSA and they serve as our major donation outlets. We help 4 of the 5 centers sustain gardens at their sites, from setup to teardown, and we’ve cohosted some events with the AAARC.
The CSA helps us connect even more broadly with the Purdue community, and even to those who are not associated with the university at all!
What should people expect from next year’s program?
I think next year you should expect a reasonably similar CSA program. It will be heavy on the peppers again, and we will keep trying for more carrots and broccoli, though it is a struggle with those. Hopefully we will have a better year for apples if we can get a drier spring and less disease. This was a really really bad year for apples. So, no drastic changes for next year’s program, but we are going to keep trying to add some different side items that we know people want but that we have struggled with production-wise.
What are some lessons you have learned?
When I started as a farm manager, production and vegetable growing wise, I would say I was chucking things in the ground and hoping it would work. Now, I’ve learned so much more about how certain plants grow, when they do well, the differences between varieties and how they work differently even though they may be the same species. I’ve learned how to engage the students in the processes of farming and how to best build their knowledge up so that they can confidently do more. And through the years, I’ve learned generally how to make all these processes smoother.
Honestly, I would say everything, I thought I knew a decent amount coming in. But it’s really easy to overemphasize what you know and what you think you know, and looking back, I didn’t know a single thing.
What are you most proud of in your time at the farm?
The students. How much both individual students and how the variety of labor that the students do has grown. The first two years of the CSA, I wrote this email. Now I don’t do anything other than edit and send it.
But generally, the students will graduate and go on to be very successful in whatever they find job wise. Some of them keep in contact with me, and I love the fact that they want to do so. I don’t know if a lot of people in academia have the luxury of having students reach back out after they graduate and so it is really cool to have that and keep those relationships.
Chris’ two cats, Bee(left) and Beethoven.