Thanks to the USU’s Student Organic Farm, the nutrition, dietetics and food sciences department (NDFS) of the College of Agriculture has broadened its reach in efforts of teaching students about eating their vegetables.

Students from the plant, soils and climate department (PSC) broke ground on the farm in 2008 but it wasn’t until recently that the partnership between the farm and the NDFS department began. Tamara Vitale, clinical associate professor for the NDFS department, said the link between the two formed when NDFS students started looking for options to fulfill graduation requirements.

Vitale said NDFS students need a substantial amount of experience and volunteer hours to graduate. “Our students know a lot about the nutritional aspect of food and why we should eat vegetables,” Vitale said. “Now students have the opportunity to experience the actual growing and harvesting of the food they know so much about.”

One of those students, Blake Beyers, began working at the student organic farm last summer, while looking for a hands-on job. As a student in the dietetics program, Beyers stumbled upon the College of Agriculture while taking a chemistry and a nutrition course for general education requirements.

However, Beyers is not a typical College of Agriculture student. When asked about his background in agriculture, Beyers is quick to say that he doesn’t have one. Never having a garden before, Beyers now knows practical farming techniques such as composting, harvesting and planting because of his time spent at the USU Student Organic Farm.

Through research and development programs, Beyers hopes to eventually create solutions for diet-related health issues, such as childhood-obesity rates. He is gaining hands-on experience from the partnership between NDFS and the farm that has created a project to teach elementary-school children about the importance of eating vegetables.

“The best way to teach kids about food is to use food,” Vitale said. As a teaching process, children are able to visit the farm. Besides teaching children, the new partnership is also interested in teaching the importance of produce to USU faculty and students.

The farm does so by selling produce outside the Taggart Student Center every Wednesday from 11 p.m. - 2 p.m. It has launched a Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) program that allows people to pay for a weekly variety of produce from the farm. Vitale said the majority of produce people buy travels an average 1,500 miles from the location it was harvested to the store where people buy it from.

For more information about the Student Organic Farm, to apply for a job or to volunteer contact Jennifer Reeve at jennifer.reeve@usu.edu.

– xxkarizxx@hotmail.com, waychow@hotmail.com