Morningside University agriculture students donate fresh vegetables to the food bank

Students in Morningside University’s Applied Agricultural and Food Science program put their labor to good use by donating food from their campus garden to the Food Bank of Siouxland on Monday.

Valerie Petersen, assistant executive director of the food bank, says it’s a great way to get fresh food. “We can’t get fresher food, can we? We’ve been working with Morningside University for a long time. We’ve been working with their applied agriculture department for a long time and we just kept working together and at some point they said, ‘Hey, we have all this produce that’s going to come out. We’d love to donate it to you.’ And we said that’s great,” Petersen says.

Dan Witten, associate professor of agriculture, is also a board member of the food bank. “We have donated as a faculty and as a department to some of the food bank outlets, but this was the first year we made a conscious effort to directly grow produce for the food bank, and we hope to have many more years to come,” he says. Witten says students have done the bulk of the work growing vegetables. “Our students are responsible for an experiential learning activity on campus known as May Term. As the spring semester ended and we moved into May and June Term, students actually planted 90% of what grows here, if not 95%,” Witten says. “And now, over the summer, we’ve had several student interns help us manage the crop. Now we’re using students to help with the harvest.”

The students also donated food to local food pantries, including 100 pounds of cucumbers to the United Methodist Church, located next to the Sioux City campus.

(By Woody Gottburg, KSCJ, Sioux City)