Field trip 2 Cornercopia
After hearing many times about the student organic farm,
Cornercopia, I was actually pretty excited to see where we had gotten some of
the ingredients we’d be cooking with in our cooking lab. Although the Fall
section apparently had much more cornercopia produce, I’m pretty sure there
were at least a couple of things which were frozen that we had the opportunity
to cook with.
Cornercopia is a student-run organic farm on the St. Paul
campus. The idea was brought to life in 2004, and today has over 2 acres of
farmland where students have the opportunity to grow things on campus property,
organically.
The tour actually started indoors, in a building owned by
the U which Cornercopia was renting space from. I believe we started in the
Plant Growth Facilities. During the morning, we learned that Cornercopia can
really only afford to rent out space in these facilities during the spring
semester (basically the winter and spring). In this facility, we got to see
some of the spaces were the processing occurs. For Cornercopia, processing
means the weighing, cleaning, packaging, etc. of the produce that they actually
sell.
After seeing the “processing” areas, we were shown one of
the of the indoor greenhouse areas, where seeds were being nurtured to take
root. Now, not being much of a gardener myself and never having true nursery/gardening
experience, this blew my mind. Why let a plant struggle trying to take seed out
in the elements, when you can grow it in a safe, predictable environment, and
give it a good start? Not only does this likely extend the time you can grow
things, I speculate that it increases the rate of crops which actually make it
to being harvested.
We saw another indoor greenhouse space where various plants
where doing more growing than just sprouting and taking seed. We actually saw
where some spinach plants were which had been harvested and eaten the day
before. The spinach was the spinach we ate at the campus club, and it was
delicious.
Finally, we went outside to see the actually land. Although
it was cold, windy, and rainy, we saw the 2 + acres which are set aside. What I
found really interesting was actually seeing the clovers they had planted as
cover crops. Since we talked about cover crops quite a bit in class, it was
particularly interesting because I had to yet to intentionally see an example
of this.
The 2+ acres seemed like quite a bit of space, especially
with the number of people involved in growing with Cornercopia. Learning about
their business model, selling much of their produce on campus, but always being
able to sell it to the Campus Club, also really interested me. Cornercopia is
in a unique situation with its campus partnerships to be able to grow so many
things. Now knowing the bits of tender love and car which really are needed to
run an organic farm, it’s apparent that it is by no means an easy operation to
run, however it also seems from everybody who does it that it is incredibly
rewarding when things work out.
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