Editor's Note: This blog post was written by SNRE student Laura Matson (MS NRE/ MUP Candidate 2013).  Laura recently sat down with Lindsey MacDonald, one of the project managers for the University of Michigan Sustainable Food Program, to learn more about the program and the upcoming Harvest Festival.

What is the University of Michigan Sustainable Food Program?

UMSFP is an umbrella organization for all of the student-driven sustainable food groups on campus: Cultivating Community, Michigan Sustainable Foods Initiative, Friends of the Campus Farm, Brassica (the new food stand), CAFí‰ (Consortium on Agriculture, Food, and the Environment), and UMBees. There are a lot of students on campus working toward the same goals but weren’t communicating very well, so there was a need for a unifying body. This is our attempt to do that.

How did the push to create a farm on campus start?

There’s been lot of student interest in it for a while.  As part of the Campus Sustainability Integrated Assessment, the Food team recommended that UM have a campus farm. Adding up the student interest and the recommendation, looking at peer institutions that have campus farms, the question became “Why doesn’t Michigan have a campus farm?” so we started organizing around this idea. 

Some of the energy that built it up was from the “Sustainability and the Campus” course. There was a group of undergraduate students who developed a proposal and made some recommendations for campus farm locations. Student interest was high in continuing the project after the class, so I worked with one of those students to write the Planet Blue Student Innovation Fund grant, which we were awarded contingent on us getting funding for a full-time farm manager. This meant the project couldn’t stop. 

It has continued with the SNRE master’s project group working on the project as well as the bigger picture of looking at the sustainable food program throughout the University. With that we [Lindsey, Liz Dengate, Allyson Green, and Jerry Tyrell] started a pilot garden this summer.  It was small, but it was enough to get volunteers interested and excited and see what we could grow in the space.  Now, we’re able to do some math to see what that translates to for the bigger space we’ll plant this coming spring.

Is the new bigger space also at the Botanical Gardens?

It is. It’s adjacent to the pilot plot.  One of the reasons we decided on the Botanical Gardens as a location is that there was land there that folks were willing to let us use as well as expertise of the employees for growing things and operating the equipment.

What are you working on to get the two-acre plot ready in the spring? Fundraising to hire a farm manager?

Yes, in a perfect world we would have money to hire a full-time farm manager by the end of this semester so that we can go through the long University hiring process and have someone on board before it’s time to put stuff in the ground.

You’ve had some success fundraising already, right?

We’ve had pockets of financial success here and there. We got a small grant from Bank of Ann Arbor to cover costs for the pilot garden. We’ve had tons of verbal support from faculty and staff, but there hasn’t been a financial commitment from within the institution yet.

For students who are just hearing about the Sustainable Food Program, how can they get involved?

There are lots of ways to get involved. You can show up to our workdays and harvest the veggies that are out there. We’re going to start planting some things in the greenhouses at the Botanical Gardens and we need help getting that started. You don’t need experience doing that kind of thing; we just need manpower.  There’s the more administrative and strategic document-writing side of things that are really important too. We can always use help with grant writing and writing letters to key stakeholders.

We send out a weekly newsletter on Sunday nights. Jerry Tyrell writes them and they’re amazing. They provide updates on what’s happening with all of our member groups. So if you’re interested in sustainable food, that could translate into you getting involved with Cultivating Community or the food stand. The newsletter gives those updates as well as some of the community happenings. It’s a pretty good spectrum of updates on ways to get involved. People can always just email one of our project group members too.

The Harvest Festival is coming up on Thursday. What are the goals for the event?

We are constantly running into people who haven’t heard of the Sustainable Food Program or the campus farm, but as soon as they hear about it they’re super interested and excited. We’re trying to figure out how to get the word out to both the University and the broader community.  We’re looking to engage people who are interested in the business side of things, community-building side of things, and everything that goes along with the farm beyond digging in the dirt and growing veggies. So hopefully we’ll get people of all backgrounds and interests at the event to see the space and see the vision for where we want to go with the space. The Botanical Gardens aren’t right on Central Campus and easy to access, so we’re trying to provide an enticing and easy way to get out there. And we want to celebrate food and have fun and start a tradition.

What’s going to happen at the Festival?

It’s from 4 to 8 on Thursday. There will be four different musical groups, an a capella group and three bluegrass groups. There will be dinner provided by chefs from the University Unions who got food from the small local farms that the University purchases from to make a fun dinner. We’re also doing fun art things so people can help visualize the space. We’re going to be planting garlic. There will be bocce ball, horseshoes, and corn hole. I hear there’s going to be hula hooping.

There’s an $8 suggested donation for students prior to the event, $10 for the general public. You can get tickets online at UMSFP.com.

For the Harvest Festival, if you don’t have extra dollar to spend, or you just want to get more involved, you can volunteer and get in for free. We need volunteers to help with shifts throughout the day – from morning set up to clean up after the event. You can sign up to volunteer here.