Penn State is celebrating the bounty of local farms by buying more food from local farmers and participating for the first time in a Farm-to-College program.

The program is part of a nationwide initiative to enhance business ties between universities and local farms, says Penn State’s Farm-to-College coordinator Emily Cook, who acts as a liaison between farmers and university officials. “I think it was a big step for Penn State to hire someone, full time, to be dedicated to the Farm-to-College cause,” Cook says. “That carries a lot of weight when I talk to the farmers.”

Cook, a master’s degree candidate in horticulture, spent six years working in vegetable production at New Morning Farm in Houstontown and managed a 25-acre vegetable farm in New Jersey prior to being hired by Penn State Food Services, so she understands both the farmer’s plight and the demands of the university.

“I understand from the farmers’ side all of the conflicts and pressures of the marketing they have to do just to make a profit,” Cook says. “At the farm in New Jersey, we had to go all the way to Washington, D.C., to sell as much as we needed to sell at their farmer’s market.”

Cook believes it is becoming harder and harder for local farmers to turn a decent profit for their small-farm production and that the university is trying to lend local farm families a hand by supporting their business through the Farm-to-College program.

“ The idea behind this is to have the university buy more food from local farmers,” says Linda Moist, owner of Clan Stewart Farm in Huntingdon and a senior extension associate in the College of Agricultural Sciences. Moist’s farm boasts fresh produce, meats, eggs, home-baked breads, and fresh fruit pies. “The program provides financial support for people trying to hold on to their farms.”

The problem in the past has been that the university’s foodpurchasing process can seem daunting to farmers, Cook points out. “Penn State’s size poses a big issue with buying,” she says. “A big university has big food needs, and the problem then becomes, how are we going to find a farmer that can produce the quantity we need and can afford to sell it to us at wholesale prices?”

This poses challenges for both university purchasers and farmers, Cook notes. “Having 10 pounds of something coming from here and 40 pounds from there could be a nightmare for university purchasers,” she explains. “And as for farmers—Penn State plans its menus three months in advance. It’s hard for farmers to think that far ahead and generate the amounts of produce that the university needs at the competitive prices it wants.”

The university has done business with local farms in the past. It has worked with Harner Farm in State College for the past 25 years and currently gets 30 percent of its milk from Hartle’s Farm in Bellefonte. “The trick is, we need to build relationships with more local farmers,” Cook says.

The university also prides itself in being somewhat self-sufficient in certain areas of food production. It buys much of its food from the university’s own creamery, bakery, and horticulture farm. In fact, the University Creamery produces a total of 125,000 gallons of ice cream, sherbet, frozen yogurt, soft-serve, and milk-shake mix per year for Penn State Food Services—and makes more than 100,000 pounds of cheese for the dining halls annually.

Seventy percent of the university’s milk comes from Penn State’s own farms, and with the remaining 30 percent coming from Bellefonte, 100 percent of the 300,000 total gallons of milk the university purchases annually is produced locally. With all of the milk coming from only as close as Bellefonte, the university avoids paying high costs for shipping. Buying from the area then stimulates the local economy—something that the Farm-to-College program touts. Buying internally recycles money back into the university, which Cook believes should allow for more money to be put toward purchasing from the local county farms.

“ There are a lot of economic benefits to buying locally,” Cook says. “The thing is, people have to want to make this work to support our community.”

— Natalie Inger