This project is a significant expansion of the current local food partnership existing between the Student Sustainable Farm (SSF), Multifunctional Woody Perennial Polyculture (MWP), FSHN Pilot Processing Plant (PPP), and UIUC Dining. Presently the Sustainable Agriculture Food System grows, processes, and serves on campus a variety of tomato sauces (pizza sauce is served across campus) and hot sauce. Soon, the Sustainable Agriculture Food System will add a whole wheat flour milling line. It have a very successful and growing program to provide quality, sustainable, and local food products and education to the UIUC students. This particular project will focus on the addition of a fresh juice processing line that will be able to handle a wide array of fruits and vegetables, packaged into an array of containers from single serving to bulk. As with the other projects, this partnership has no funding for large capital equipment expenditures, and relies on grants to increase its capacity. Dining Services is a strong partner in this project and has agreed to provide a grant to help with the purchase of items needed to produce fresh juice products including a harvester for fruit from the MWP site. The full proposal requested both juice extraction and juice bottling equipment. This phase of funding covers remaining bottling equipment costs. All bottles will feature messaging urging students to recycle and spotlighting sustainable goals and outcomes This proposal directly funds: 1) Bottling equipment 2) Some associated supplies.

The Sustainable Student Farm currently grows numerous varieties of hot chilies, but demand is often lacking in the dining halls over the summer and excess crops are simply composted. One option to help reduce this waste is adding fermentation capabilities to the current Sustainable Agriculture Food Systems to create hot sauce for the dining halls. One especially exciting aspect of this project is that the student body itself will have the opportunity to create different blends of sauces, with the winner of the taste test becoming the official hot sauce for the semester.

While this equipment will initially be used to create campus’s hot sauce, it can also be used in the future to create products ranging from sauerkraut and pickles to soy sauce and kombucha.

The SSC awarded the Sustainable Student Farm a grant in 2013 to build a transplant greenhouse that also housed a vermicomposting pilot porject with Dining Services. This was meant to test the feasability of collecting pre-consumer food waste from the Dining hall facilities and converting it into worm compost for use on the student farm. In its first year of operation the greenhouse has been heated soley from propane, which is the most common and simplest heating system for these types of greenhouses. The nature of the worms used in this type of composting require an ideal temperature range of 40-80F. In order to attain this, the greenhouse needs to be heated during the winter months.

In 2014 the greenhouse consumed approximately 1600 gallons of propane for heating. At an average price of $2 this equals $3200/year in heating costs. By comparison if the biomass furnace is used and can replace 80% of the heating requirements that would only cost $1664/year in heating costs. The main reaplacement fuel would be #2 Shell Corn @ 15% moisture. This is readily available in the midwest and costs on average about $3.5/bushel. It would take about 366 bushels of corn to replace the BTU’s provided by the propane. The nature of managing the biomass furnace would allow us to replace only 80% of the heating requirements for the greenhouse. Future development of these furnaces could one day replace the requirement completely. However, the propane system will be kept as a back up.

Fresh Press, in collaboration with the Sustainable Student Farm (SSF) and the Woody Perennial Polyculture (WPP) site, are aiming to grow student opportunities through individual and collaborative research and public engagement efforts. The money requested in the Farm and Fiber grant will contribute to the acquisition of walk-in coolers, perennial crops, bee hives/equipment, additional paper dry box, a bailer/hay rake, and a bale shredder blower. This equipment will benefit each project at the SSF by increasing farm production and allowing for increased agricultural fiber yield, leading to a growth in paper production. This increased capacity will triple production capacity and allow greater opportunity for university paper commissions and student workshops in Fresh Press facilities at South Studios.