I’m Alison Kingery and I’m the production chef at Ford dining court and this is how we do farm to Ford
So students are our main customer, of course, at Ford, and students these days have really big expectations, for what we’re able to do in the food industry.
So we are fortunate enough to be able to link up with the Purdue Student Farm and a couple other of the Purdue facilities to bring in gobs and gobs of produce.
We’re able to do all kinds of different things;
the biggest volume is apples—from one of Purdue Research Facilities, but we’ve also done all different kinds of greens, radishes, peppers, onions, garlic.
And if we don’t have things for a couple weeks, they ask where they've gone, so it’s obviously very important to students.
And, in turn, the momentum is increasing for this kind of opportunity—
So we hope to have even more in the future.
It’s something that they’re really comfortable with, they’re used to, and really expecting it.
Farmers markets are certainly a popular thing to go to; young people are involved in this, and think that its critical to have.
These students are really educated about their food and they wanna know where is comes from, how it was grown,
so we just have a responsibility to incorporate that kind of produce into their daily meals.
We were able to harvest about 20 thousand pounds of apples, and that’s just a start.
There was one day we brought in 350 pounds of eggplant from the Student Farm.
So the cost associated with a lot of this local food, that the perception is that local will always be more expensive
but for us it’s been absolutely the opposite.
Things that we’re dealing with are Purdue resources already.
Again thousands and thousands of pounds from the student farm
but we have a deal with them that whatever they pick and they don’t sell
to their weekly CSA’s or their weekly farmers market shares,
we will buy, at the same cost, so they essential have zero waste of what they’re able to harvest.
I think we have a responsibility as a school of Agriculture; “Land Grant University”
to really tie into our roots, literally I guess,
so with the Student Farm we’ve been able to incorporate so many different things we’ve done and most of it is student driven.
So a lot of their staff is students whether it is for a class or even volunteers,
I believe some interns its just really really fantastic to be able to offer something that was picked, maybe even this morning, and put it out on the line, and be able to advertise that it’s a Purdue product.
Often times a student product;
having students serve students food that was grown by students is I think about as good as it gets.
And for the students it’s definitely not more expensive to be able to get into these opportunities and the quality is just exponentially better
so I think we’ve really raised the standards for what we’re able to offer.