This Wednesday our Purdue Student Farm interns took a trip to Illinois to visit UIUC’s Sustainable Student Farm. We met with their farm manager, Matt Turino, who toured us around the 7-acre plot.
The UIUC Sustainable Student Farm boasts its own greenhouse, a permaculture area full of chestnut trees and currant bushes, and several pollinator habitats, some of which double as wind-breaks. Fruit production was also present, with a small peach orchard and several strawberry patches. The Purdue students joined the UIUC interns in the summer field (tomatoes, peppers, & eggplant) to help with the weeding, and got a chance to talk and laugh with the interns as some hand-pulled weeds while others chopped them using tools.
While the UIUC Sustainable Student Farm runs a smaller CSA than we do here at Purdue, they sell a significant portion of their produce to the UIUC dining courts, with their main crop being Roma tomatoes that get turned into pizza sauce via a partnership with their food science pilot plant. They also run a successful on-campus farm stand that provides students with a place to buy a variety of fresh vegetables.
The higher acreage on the Sustainable Student Farm, and the difference in the market it caters to comes with differences in the kind of work being done and the tools used to do it. One of the biggest differences was in the amount and function of the mechanized tools used at the UIUC Sustainable Student Farm, and our students got to see a diversity of tractors each with various functions that are often performed by hand here at the Purdue Student Farm.
The storm rolling in cut our time with our UIUC friends a bit short, but it was an experience that highlighted the diversity between different universities’ student farms, and we look forward to hosting the UIUC interns here at Purdue at the end of July.