If food systems work in cycles, Ozarks Tech Fresh Harvest is doing everything right.
Ozarks Tech students grow the food, Ozarks Tech students eat it, students on campus in Springfield teach others how to cook with it even, and now, they take it back to the farm as compost.
"It’s not employee driven it’s students helping students at multiple different levels throughout the initiative, and that is just really really attractive to our students,” explained Sarah Bargo College Director of Student Care & Engagement, mostly known publicly through OTC Cares.
Every week during the season, the Fresh Harvest program distributes hundreds of pounds of fresh produce on the Springfield campus. Bargo’s team makes it available from the morning into the afternoon, and students take it.
"It is an unstaffed table. It’s just free for the taking, and we’ve never been able to go till four p.m. Usually the produce is gone by 12 or one o’clock,” she said. “On the occasion that we have any leftovers, it seems to be the green beans.”
The program is in its second year. It now has a corporate sponsor. Bargo said it has low overhead, and they are quickly developing it into something sustainable. It began though, like the veggies, on the farm.
The nearly 100 acre farm on the campus of the Richwood Valley branch of Ozarks Tech, in Christian County.
Rob Flatness, Agriculture Department Chair said students there are learning how to grow things at commercially viable scales. The best way to learn how, is to do it. That means growing a lot of produce.
"We would walk around the five-gallon buckets giving this produce away to anybody that would take it,” Flatness explained, they still distribute some on the Richwood Valley campus, but they realized there was a real need in Springfield. “There’s a lot of grocery stores around, selling fresh produce, but it's expensive and a lot of your food pantries, you have dry goods, you don’t necessarily have produce that’s fresh and this is fresh from the farm. It’s coming straight from our garden.”
They began by just sharing, now the Ozarks Tech culinary department is involved showing students how to cook pico de gallo and a nice salad at events like Wednesday’s. This helps make up for the fact that many students just don’t know what to do with a lot of produce.
Fresh Harvest is expanding now too. The Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society on Ozarks Tech’s campus is sponsoring a program to take compost from campus back to the farm.
In a bustling atrium on the Ozarks Tech Springfield Campus Wednesday, Ozarks Tech Fresh Harvest looks like farm-to-table on a community scale.