Farm to dining in two hours

Most food travels an average of 1,500 miles from farm to table, but at Kennesaw State University’s dining hall — The Commons — a lot of the food was grown less than three miles away at Hickory Grove Farm.

“The further the food travels, the less nutrient-dense it is,” said Melissa McMahon, assistant director of marketing for KSU’s culinary and hospitality services.

Hickory Grove is the university’s farm, where student volunteers and university staff work eight of the 16 plantable acres, according to Robin Taylor, the farm manager.

“Any food that we harvest is in The Commons within two hours of being harvested,” Taylor said. “There’s no distributors, there’s no pick up … we take it straight in, wash it, we put it in the coolers and label it.”

McMahon said between 20 and 25 percent of the food served on campus comes from Hickory Grove.

“Monday through Thursday, every day, we feed 5,000 to 8,000 students a day,” she added.

Two classes are also taught using the farm — beginning organic farming and beginning beekeeping, McMahon said.

The Hickory Grove Farm land used to be a cement-mixing facility for the Georgia Department of Transportation until 2012, when GDOT allowed KSU to use the land as its campus farm, McMahon said.

The land is now full of agriculture and livestock, with greenhouses full of cucumbers and tomatoes, rows of squash and strawberries, an orchard of about 80 apple trees, chickens for eggs and even three goats — although they are male goats that don’t produce milk.

For the 2014-15 growing season, the farm is projected to produce more than 20,000 pounds of tomatoes, according to the university website.

Taylor said the farm also has about 60 logs inoculated with shiitake mushroom spores, which will produce three varieties of shiitake mushrooms for the next five years.

McMahon said the sustainability aspect is one of the key drivers for the farm’s operation, noting it is all organic with natural methods of soil preparation, pest control and fertilization.

Another way the farm is sustainable is by planting crops in phases so all the plants don’t have to be harvested all at once and there is a steady supply of food.