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As part of its Organic Agriculture Lands initiative, Dane County will lease 24 acres of county park land to an organic grower, according to a Dane County statement. The county also has a community garden at another park, and hopes to open up another fresh food market in Madison, the statement said.

University of Wisconsin students are also among those advocating for sustainable food. Slow Food UW, a student run organization that advocates clean, healthy and fair food, provides students with access to sustainable food through the cafe they operate on campus during lunchtime every Wednesday.

The campus-based chapter of the Slow Food movement was founded just four years ago and already runs four different projects with the help of forty interns, Taylor Lundberg, the café finance intern at SFUW said in an email to The Badger Herald.

Lundberg added SFUW does not only promote organic produce on campus, but also throughout Dane County and works with farmers throughout southern Wisconsin.

“SFUW prides itself on benefiting both the UW-Madison community as well as Dane County as a whole,” Lundberg said. “We really make an effort to diversify who and where we are sourcing from while maintaining our sole principle of good, clean and fair food.”

SFUW attains its products from a variety of local producers, including Willy Street Co-op, Hook’s Cheese in Mineral Point and Jordandal Farms in Argyle.

In addition to SFUW, F.H. King is another student-run organization on campus that promotes sustainable agriculture. Axel Adams, a spokesperson for F.H. King, said the organization has an organically run student garden.

“We have about a two-and-a-half acre student garden that we run organically,” King said. “That’s kind of like a teaching garden for students – for a lot of students it’s their first exposure to organic production.”