Abstract
Campus farms and gardens are proliferating across college and university campuses. While they may have unique missions, at their core those missions often include promoting student learning, campus sustainability, and strong campus-community relations. In this reflective essay, we share our perspective on the sustainability of one such farm, the Farm at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, to encourage other analysts to similarly assess the interactions among these missions and sustainability’s environmental, economic, and social pillars. We particularly emphasize the factors influencing the Farm’s social sustainability, including the institution’s pedagogical mission, treatment of farm labor, impact on the local food economy, and equitable provision of food for students. We find that the Farm administrators misconstrue “economic” sustainability as “financial” independence and profitability. This hampers the social mission of equitably supplying students with the farm’s food and offering curricular and extracurricular enrichment. We suggest ways forward that help administrators recognize the diverse values that fulfillment of additional social and environmental missions might provide, beyond direct revenues. We conclude with recommendations for institutions interested in pursuing a similar sustainability assessment of their campus farm or garden.
Highlights
Over 300 campus farms and gardens, ranging in size from less than one acre to thousands of acres, have been created outside of the traditional landgrant institutions (LaCharite, 2016)
We return to a Venn diagram of the sustainability triad (Figure 2) to guide our concluding reflection
Beginning at the top of the diagram with the “pure” environmental pillar, the Farm’s environmental impacts were minimal due both to the Farm’s small size and the balance it struck between sustainable cropping practices and unsustainable tractor cultivation
Summary
Over 300 campus farms and gardens, ranging in size from less than one acre to thousands of acres, have been created outside of the traditional landgrant institutions (LaCharite, 2016). While teaching farms on college and university campuses are not new, the emphasis on sustainability, including economic, environmental, and social sustainability, as well as the contributions to emerging local food movements, is relatively new and serves as an important motivator to establish these farms for school administrators, faculty, staff, and students (Barlett, 2011; LaCharite, 2016; Sayre, 2011) Along with pursuing these missions, the farm must meet a specific budgetary demand that it not create an additional burden on the college’s operational budget (Holthouser & Terry, 2012). These elements include the pedagogical relationships that connect campus farms to students and teachers as well as the food justice relationship that determines who has the right to eat a college farm’s food
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