Where Students and Crops Grow: Purdue Student Farm Wins 2025 TEAM Award

By Devyn Raver

The Purdue Student Farm (PSF), a small-scale sustainable farm managed by the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture (HLA), has been awarded the Purdue Agriculture TEAM Award. Established in 1995, the TEAM Award recognizes outstanding interdisciplinary team achievements of faculty and staff that support Purdue Agriculture’s mission in teaching, research or extension. In addition to this recognition, award recipients will recieve $10,000 to further strengthen and support their program initiatives.

Located on the northern edge of campus, the farm functions as an outdoor lab, supporting innovative sustainable agricultural studies and experiments.

Student involvement—from volunteers in the Purdue Student Farm Organization to those enrolled in the “Small Farms Experience” courses to part-time undergraduate interns, full-time summer interns and graduate researchers-- is central to PSF’s mission and the farm’s day-to-day operations. “We’re very dependent on students being here, working and getting their hands dirty,” said Chris Adair, senior farm manager of the PSF and advisor of the Purdue Student Farm Organization. “A lot of what we do is built for students to take ownership and really learn so they can teach new students coming in.”