UC Santa Cruz to buy organic produce from local growers

by Marisa McClellan (Subscribe to Marisa McClellan's posts)
Posted Nov 8th 2007 12:44PM
Filed under: Farming, Newspapers, On the Blogs

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UCSC students posing with an assortment of local, organic produce

The University of California at Santa Cruz (my dad's alma mater!) has just taken their commitment to serving good food on their campus to a new level. In a revolutionary (for the University of California system at least) farm-to-college program, they've contracted to buy organic produce from seven local farmers for their five on-campus dining facilities.

Since the Santa Cruz purchasing department wasn't set up to buy individually from smaller farmers, they've created a consortium called the Monterey Bay Organic Farming Consortium (MBOFC). One of the member growers acts as coordinator, "delivering the produce to the campus dining halls three or four times a week, invoicing the university and distributing payments to the growers." Colleges and universities have a huge amount of impact on food purchasing, if a good number of other institutions were to start sourcing their food in this way, it could have a huge impact on the food production market in this country.

[via The Ethicurean]

Tags: local produce, on campus dining, organic produce, Santa Cruz, UC Santa Cruz, University of California, UniversityOfCalifornia

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11-08-2007 @ 2:21PM

kim said...

Well Damn. If only they'd thought of that while I was still going to school there...

I hope the current students appreciate it. Lord knows I wouldn't've minded something that wasn't from Sodexho. Evil foodservice empire....

11-09-2007 @ 8:20PM

PorterReport said...

We've been using locally grown organic produce for a while now, I think we're just expanding the farms we purchase from. Also, in response to kim, Sodexho went away and those workers got hired on, during the 2003-2004 school year.

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