Mission Statement
The Duke Campus Farm is a long-term project to construct a fully functional and educational farm. The farm aspires to engage students with food issues, increase sustainability at Duke, and influence campus culture to reconnect students with their food. All of our fruits and vegetables are served in Duke dining halls run by Bon Appétit, including The Great Hall and The Marketplace.  Through community workdays, workshops and other events on the site, the farm provides a place where students, faculty, staff, and members of the community to learn about food and farming.

Our main two objectives are:

• Provide diverse experiential and academic offerings to the entire Duke community around food issues.
• Increase access to and consumption of local, sustainable and student-grown food on campus.

The need
The state of food in America today is in trouble, which can be seen through the negative effects of food production and consumption on our health, our communities and the environment. Examples include underpaid farmworkers, public health problems, food safety issues, soil erosion, drinking water contamination and heavy reliance on petroleum and petroleum-based products.

The Duke Campus Farm aims to raise awareness and engage these issues with the Duke community. The Farm promotes the consumption of sustainably and locally grown produce and provides the opportunity for students to become involved in growing the food they eat. We hope that our efforts will help the Duke community to become informed consumers both on and off campus.

History
The Duke Campus Farm was born out of a course taught by Professor Charlotte Clark in Spring 2010 entitled “Food and Energy.” A dedicated student team spent a year researching the feasibility of the Duke Campus Farm. This team developed a business and operational plan that brought the dream of a farm at Duke to fruition.  In November 2010, we broke ground on the farm, tilling the land and laying soil amendments to prepare for the spring planting. April 2011 marked our first harvest and we continue to expand our fruit and vegetable operations with each season.

One year, one acre
For the past year we’ve rallied around the motto of “one year, one acre” in order to create a functional production farm and educational facility serving the Duke community. December 2011 marks the end of our one year pilot project, and what an incredible year it’s been. Please read our 2011 Annual Report here to see just how far we’ve come.

The farm site
The land where the farm sits today was previously part of a 1600 acre corn, wheat and tobacco plantation dating back to 1862. Duke bought part of that land in 1996 to add to the Forest and it had been unused until the farm’s arrival. The farm occupies one-acre currently, with half of that intensely cultivated with fruits and vegetables, and the other half in cover crop. We currently have one greenhouse for seed propagation, one large hoop house to carry out all of our winter growing and 4 beehives.

Our practices
The Campus Farm uses only natural practices and our only piece of machinery is a roto-tiller. We never use synthetic pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizers or harsh chemical herbicides. We intend to improve our sustainability by moving to no-till, an agricultural practice that disturbs the soil as little as possible, and incorporating perennials. After a few years, our farming methods will actually improve the soil, rather than degrading the land or contaminating water as some conventional farming methods do. We believe that happy soil makes for happy plants, so our solution to pests and diseases are mostly preventative, focusing primarily on increasing soil health.

Closing the circle
The farm provides the opportunity for community members to observe and immerse themselves in the complicated processes that make up the food system. They are able to study its parts in isolation and also view the system in its entirety from agricultural inputs to dinner at the Great Hall.

We try to use as few outside inputs as possible to increase our sustainability. Some of these efforts include making our own soil from plant waste and using pre and post consumer waste from the dining halls that serve our food as the primary source of organic matter in our permanent beds.  We’re working to close that circle even further by building a compostable toilet this winter.

What are we growing?
The farm will be growing produce year-round. This past spring (March/April 2011), we planted salad mix, radishes, chard, kale, snap peas, beets, broccoli, pac choi, lettuce, and potatoes.

During the summer, we grew heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, summer squash, basil, peppers, eggplant, sweet corn, snap beans, okra, edamame, arugula, sweet potatoes, watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew melon.

As we move into the fall, we are planting broccoli, broccoli raab, several varities of beets, carrots, radishes, acorn squash, spaghetti squash, pumpkins, butternut squash, garlic, green onions, cabbage, pac choi, lettuces, mustard greens, turnips, rutabagas, radishes, spinach, strawberries and a variety of herbs.