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Fort Lewis students reap harvest,
Fun at Home Grown Festival

Professor Tina Evans and sociology major Corrie McCarthy work together at the Home Grown Festival.

Durango's Home Grown Festival impressed upon Fort Lewis students the importance of locally grown foods and community effort.

Food for Thought, a major participant in the fall community event, promotes local food education and community action. 

Focusing on the value of local foods, sustainability, and the local economy this unique Durango event helped make use of local harvests, especially apples.  Seven truckloads of apples were brought to the park after the community, including Fort Lewis students, picked and loaded, the apples.

"Students rode their bikes to orchards and loaded backpacks with apples returning to the park for processing" said Tina Evans, chair of the Environmental Studies program, a new Fort Lewis major.

With seed money from the city and county, the event became a well organized opportunity for the community to learn about critical food issues, and reap the harvests. Thirty Environmental Studies and Sociology students helped organize the event. They learned hands-on "how much food we can produce here, what works here and how the community works together," Evans said.  

Students helped gather truck-loads of locally grown apples.

Students taking the Planet Earth – Integrated Learning classes worked with the community in promoting food issues, drying food, and pressing apples. A mountain of apples were sorted, washed, and pressed for local businesses to make cider and beer.

Amanda Sellers, a sociology major, said, "this event is very important because it utilizes food in the community and shows how much food we have locally".

Increasing the use of locally grown and harvested fruit results in a reduced carbon footprint, fresher, healthier foods and keeping the buck local. 

"There is the power of people coming together with a common vision, that we can feed the local community," according to Evan Meyer a Humanities-Sociology major. “With the high price of gas, shipping food from far away doesn't make sense environmentally. And since there is such an abundance in the area why not utilize it?“

With the abundance of apples and volunteers, the Home Grown Festival educated the community about the power of networking. "We can all do our individual thing, but if we work together as a community there is strength, unity and a powerful micro-economy," Evans said. 

This timely event shows the value in conservation, preservation and utilization of local foods.  Both Evan and Amanda hope to see Home Grown Festival grow every year!