Saving the Campus Farm: One Approach to Leveraging Institutional Support for a Campus Farm Space

The number of university and college campus farms have increased 13-fold since 1992 to over 300 campuses (LaCharite, 2016). According to reporting by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) (2018), 80% of campus farm spaces are less than 5 acres in size and 86% are located on campuses with no agriculture school (AASHE, 2018). Campus farms provide a rich interdisciplinary social context of community based, sustainable agriculture that spans the entire suite of social and physical sciences as well as non-STEM fields such as business, religious studies, and communication. Yet, the majority of these farm spaces are underutilized in the curriculum, engaging primarily with students majoring in agriculture or sustainability-related degrees and co-curricular programs (Galt et al., 2016; Parr, 2011). This case study posits that a lack of connection to curriculum and the resulting championship of campus farm spaces by faculty, stymies institutional commitments to the long-term funding of campus farm spaces. This document describes an approach taken at a small, liberal arts, primarily undergraduate institution to generate institutional support for the campus farm through the creation of cross-disciplinary undergraduate course modules that use food and farming for a situated learning context.