Pulling up the ivy: sustainable agriculture on campus

The pilot demonstration garden in its first season at Forbes College, Princeton University

When I first came to Princeton I knew I wanted to work in a garden. I sought out every environmental group I could find, anticipating Sungold tomato harvests and beds of brassicas. I naively assumed I would find a sustainable food project and garden already in place where I might spend a few hours a week weeding or managing compost. Over the last three years, however, I have started a student-run organic garden and co-founded the first student-run campus farmers’ market in the country; sustainable food has been central to my experience at Princeton.

Creating these changes has been a challenge, but using the university’s framework to my advantage has made the process enjoyable and effective. As students, we have access to an entire institution devoted to helping us achieve our goals. While each school has a unique way of operating, it is to your benefit to identify your natural allies and figure out how sustainable food fits in with existing groups, classes, and programs, both within the school and larger community. Finding how your project fits within your school will help you determine the purpose of the garden and define its outlets for produce, size and location, and crop composition. The good news is that at colleges and universities, natural allies of sustainability initiatives are not hard to come by once you start looking, and can be found in a much wider variety of fields and departments than you might initially expect. Being a student opens a lot of doors within and beyond your school, you just need to figure out how to use the resources available to you. Persistence is a powerful means of progress and there are people willing to listen to your ideas and advise you (professors), support systems in place to approve those plans and offer more advice (administrators and staff), and a campus full of students to help you brainstorm and see your plans through.

As a Princeton freshman, I discovered the budding of a sustainability movement in an unexpected place: Dining Services met regularly with students about how to green their food options, cleaning supplies, construction materials—they considered the impact of almost every aspect of their operation. While there wasn’t an existing undergraduate garden on campus, I found support and guidance for starting one from Dining Services, faculty, and staff. Through them I learned of interested faculty and staff members who offered their help and perspective as well. I approached my residential college and discovered they were overwhelmingly interested and willing to fund start up costs.

I founded The Garden Project, a student group to educate campus about sustainable food and agriculture. The first meeting brought a room full of students and we shared hopes of pulling up a bit of Princeton’s ivy to make space for carrots and lettuce. I was fortunate in my timing, Princeton’s first sustainability manager began working in the fall of my sophomore year and her interest and advice helped me win the approval of the Princeton Sustainability Committee.

We broke ground on Earth Day, 2006, with a pilot demonstration garden, modestly nestled between the annex of my residential college and the town golf course. With official university approval, I could work freely with Grounds & Maintenance and they were more than willing to till in the spring and deliver composted leaves collected from campus and anything else they could provide. We delivered herbs and cherry tomatoes weekly to the dining hall of the college and cultivated friendships with its chefs who looked forward to the less common produce we occasionally included.

Earlier this summer at the 1.5-acre plot on 79 Alexander St.

The following summer I interned with the Office of Sustainability, now an established department (!), and received permission to expand the demonstration garden to a nearby 1.5-acre plot. The Garden Project is enjoying our first full season there, with plans for how best to use the space as an educational tool. Our garden serves a broad educational purpose, as Princeton does not offer departments exclusively in botany or agriculture, and we hope to model a sustainable food system by creating within a single space a cohesive progression from farm to fork. We try to expose  every element of the gardens’ maintenance so that we can educate students on all aspects of organic gardening and crop diversity. While connecting vendors for our campus Farmers’ Market (see post by Katy Andersen ’08 for more FM information), I introduced the Garden Project to local farmers and food producers. We have developed those relationships, either by volunteering to work at a farm for a day or providing complimentary produce to local organic food vendors. This year we will have a CSA and pizza vendor speak at the neighboring residential college as the first event in a larger Sustainability Dinner Lecture Series.

For my senior year I am working on making the initiatives I’ve help create sustainable in another sense; that is, by finding people to take over from where I will leave off. This is one of the biggest issues for colleges: the 4-year turnover rate makes continuity in student initiatives an elusive ideal. Other students and I are collaborating to unify existing movements and establish a full-time position for what we hope to call the Princeton Farm to Fork Project. We’ve come a long way in the past three years and I’m excited to see what we can do in three more. I wish you all the best of luck in your efforts to bring sustainable food on campus in the coming year!

Ruthie