01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, November 24, 2004

BY GAIL CIAMPA
Journal Food Editor

There's a program at Brown University worthy of a fine agricultural school.

Don't gasp! Brown isn't so much going "ag" as it is going green, and helping the local economy at the same time.

The result is that students dining on campus during the week might be enjoying an apple pie made with some of the 900 pounds of apples picked by fellow students the weekend before.

Without the help of the students, a local farm might not have sold all those apples.

Harvest crews of students have made weekly farm or orchard visits across the area since August. They've picked produce, from raspberries to eggplants to potatoes. The farmers have been paid for the food and delivered it to university chefs who have been inspired by the bounty of fresh produce and served the dishes in the main dining halls.

But the harvest crews are only part of this story. A new chapter includes a Rhode Island network for local farmers that will help them sell their fresh goods to institutions like Brown.

It's all part of a sustainable food initiative that has taken hold on College Hill. Sustainability is a mouthful. But it's also the term for a movement that seeks to make working the earth economically worthwhile for small farmers, environmentally sound for the land, and that satifies everyone's appreciation for the freshest, best ingredients. Its mission is neatly answered by the Brown community harvest program.

The motivation for the program is to keep agriculture in this state, said Ken Ayars, chief of the state's Department of Environmental Management's Division of Agriculture.

It's also the goal to develop a program that gets food from local farms not only on the tables at school, but eventually in restaurants, too, .

With a grant from the Rhode Island Foundation, the support of DEM, and the work of an energetic food system coordinator at Brown, Louella Hill, everything is in place to launch this new world order for the next growing season.

It's easy for institutions to buy from food distributors who truck food across the country. It takes communication to connect farmers with local buyers, said Ayars.

Then there's the reality of life running a small farm.

"Farmers don't have a spare minute," said Louella Hill, a recent Brown grad, and now coordinator of this new program that helps farmer and chef alike.

Hill said there is often food left behind because the farmers run out of time to harvest it all. "It becomes more viable to plow it under."

With the help of Brown harvest crews, farmers don't have to leave food behind. The students do the work. The farmers get paid for their goods. And everyone wins.

It also fulfills the students' education mission.

"Every day, there are fewer and fewer farms, and food comes from farther away," said Amy Lerner, a Brown master's student in environmental studies who's worked on the harvest crews. "This is not just an agricultural issue; it's an environmental, health and cultural dilemma."

By the time Hill brought her ideas to Brown, the university had started an effort to buy more food locally. But matching up farmers with dining services takes time and communication. That's the role she played, matching the university to farmers with goods.

Supported by the $21,500 grant from the RI Foundation, soon a Web site will be up and running on which farmers can post a list of what they have available. Chefs and buyers, from universities and restaurants alike, can then check the site and find food they need locally.

The promise of local ingredients is a powerful lure in the kitchen for Rose Forrest, production manager of Brown University Dining Services.

"The produce itself is an inspiration, because it is always fresh and flavorful," she said. "It is picked when it is ripe, which is seldom the case with products that travel to get to you. Those items tend to be picked before they are ripe, and get to you still unripe or bland in flavor."

The hope is that Brown's program will become a model for other colleges and university dining services in the state, said Ayars. Now, most rely on food distributers for all their raw ingredients, not having time to research and buy local products.

Ayers has invited farmers to a meeting next week to introduce them to the concept and to show off the new Web-based system (www.locallygrownfood.com) that will make it easy to connect with institutional buyers including local restaurants.

"The public wants to buy from local farms and eat food that doesn't have to be trucked in," Ayars said. He hopes to make it happen beyond the farmers' market concept.

As for those harvest crews -- who worked at spots including Hill Orchards in Johnston, Barden Orchards in Foster, Urban Edge Farm in Cranston, Wishing Stone Farm in Little Compton, Mello Farm in Tiverton, City Farm in Providence, Summer Field Farm in Cumberland and Maplewood Farm in Portsmouth -- they've grown almost too big, said Hill.

"I could use a school bus," she said, because cars aren't big enough to transport all the students interested in the harvest crews.

Apparently, all her efforts, including weekly e-mails always signed, "Peas and potatoes, Louella" have reached an interested community.