Northland has made a huge—huge!—commitment to food sustainability by using the Real Food Standards with a goal spending twenty percent of our dining food budget on local foods by 2020. We have a state-of-the-art food processing facility and thriving on-campus gardens. We compost campus wide and take in food waste, leaves, wood shavings, and other organic material from community households and businesses to feed our commercial composter. Through all of this we’ve established lasting friendships with local farmers to form a network of opportunities for you.

With this minor, you will learn about sustainable agriculture from humanities, social science, and natural science perspectives; explore the production and distribution of food on field trips, in the campus gardens, and in the classroom; and will put that knowledge into practice during a field-based practicum course with local farmers and community partners. The environmental impacts of both conventional and sustainable agriculture is a recurrent theme throughout the minor.