(Radio Iowa) – Students in the Morningside University’s Applied Agriculture and Food Studies program put their work to good use by donating food from their on-campus garden Monday to the Food Bank of Siouxland. Food Bank associated executive director, Valerie Petersen, says it’s a great way to receive fresh food. “We can’t get any fresher in this can we? So we’ve worked with Morningside University for a long time now. We’ve worked with their applied Ag department for a long time, and we just kept working together, and eventually they said, ‘Hey, we have all this produce that’s going to be coming out. We would love to donate it to you.’ And we said, that’s great,” Petersen says.

Associate Ag professor, Dan Witten is also a board member of the Food Bank. “We’ve, as a faculty and as a department, have donated to a couple of the Food Bank’s outlets, but this was the first year we made an intentional effort to directly raise product for the food bank, and we hope it’s many to come,” he says. Witten says students did most of the work to raise the vegetables “Our students are responsible for an experiential learning activity known as May term on campus. While spring term was wrapping up and we were rolling into May and June term, students actually planted 90 percent of what you see growing out here, if not 95 percent of it,” Witten says. “And now, over the summer, we had multiple student interns help manage the crop. Now we’re using students to help harvest it.”

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