UMD ‘land lab’ grows food for dining services

Kevin Moris grew up in rural Pine County around cattle and row crops. But it was another part of the farm that drew his attention.

"I was into the garden," he said recently at the University of Minnesota Duluth farm off Jean Duluth Road. He's the farm manager at this "living lab" that joins the movement of people getting back to the roots of food.

On Sundays, the Moris family would celebrate the fruits of its labor with a big dinner featuring everything grown on the farm. It's that memory that has placed Moris where he is today.

He began as a student-manager of what officially is called UMD's Sustainable Agriculture Project, a restoration of the former 240-acre Northeast Experiment Station that dissolved in the 1970s.

Moris directs students to projects around the farm that grow food for the university's dining services — just one of its more than a dozen collaborations. "The students are so willing," Moris said. More than crops, the project involves engineering students on the mechanical aspects of the farm and future biologists, like himself, experimenting with crops.

"I have to be out in my green space," said the 2013 biology graduate.

A handful of faculty led the conversion of the abandoned station beginning in 2008 with meetings over coffee about what was happening in food and agriculture. One of those is Randel Hanson, the geography professor who spends lots of time working the farm and promoting the project.

The experimental station began in 1912 to test just how suited the region could be for agriculture. The economy was dominated by the mining and lumber industries at the time, and places like Duluth depended heavily on food coming from outside the region.

The Duluth Commercial Club wanted to change that, Hanson said.

Fruit trees were grown. Cattle and pigs were raised. Crops were tested. The station included residences for managers and lecture halls alongside barns. The first lecture at the station took place in the still-new and unused swine barn.

But after World War II, the region once again "lost the capacity to self-procure," Hanson said. Farms were getting bigger, with food consistently flooding in from warmer climes like California. Processed food began to take hold. By the 1960s, there was little interest in what kind of food could be grown in the region, Hanson said. It was "shortsighted."

Today, local food has once again captured interest. There are food share farms that are more than 20 years old in the region, but only in the past 10 years has interest exploded in knowing where food comes from. UMD had to be part of that, Hanson said.

Institutions like his are like ocean liners, he said, and can sometimes be slow to get with the times.

"We lost any capacity to teach food systems," he said, taking a break from mowing between vegetable plots on the farm. "'We have an opportunity here. It's a farm, but more than that, it's a land lab."