Loy Farm
Elon-Owned Loy Farm Could Help University Reach Future Sustainability Goals
Did you know that in addition to the on-campus sustainability resources, Elon University has a farm?
[endif]--The Elon Environmental Center at Loy Farm is a 15-acre section of land that was bought by the university in 2000 and used for storage and various biology classes until 2011. That is when the AgroEcology program was introduced at Elon, according to the Environmental Center at Loy Farm website. Now, various professors and courses utilize Loy Farm as an instructional tool.
The farm contains a greenhouse and plant beds for farming, the Design Build Studio for Responsible Architecture, the Piedmont Prairie Ecological Restoration Project and the Loy solar farm.
“The way it works here is Elon owns the land,” said Jessica Bilecki, the education and outreach coordinator for the office of sustainability at Elon. “We have a 15-year lease on the property. We are leasing it to a third party, Loy Solar, LLC. ” Loy solar farm, with its 9,900 solar panels, has the capability to produce 4,500-megawatt hours of electricity, enough to power 415 average U.S. homes for a year.
“The energy produced by the farm is not used directly on Elon’s campus, however,” Bilecki said. “If Elon wanted to use the energy directly, it would have to be physically connected to our buildings, and that would mean we would have to transmit energy through lines over or under a road to get to our buildings. But there is an old law in North Carolina that says basically you have to be an energy utility in order to do that.”
Because of this, Elon has to go through a third party. Loy Solar, LLC is in charge of the panels and is eligible for state and federal tax incentives. Elon is not. In turn, they sell the energy to Duke Energy, so anybody connected to Duke Energy’s grid could be using energy from Loy solar farm.
In addition, the solar farm puts Elon on the path to achieve their goal of being carbon neutral by 2037. Carbon neutrality is the achievement of having a net zero carbon emissions, either by buying carbon credits or balancing the amount of carbon released with an equal sequestered amount.
The solar farm is not the only thing that inhabits the 15 acres of Elon-owned land. The center also houses an agricultural farm, equipped with a greenhouse that is capable of growing foods year round without a lot of fossil fuel input, which began about three or four years ago.
“It’s modeling global citizenship and responsibility and providing an educational resource for students,” said Bilecki.
Students use the farming area primarily to study sustainable food production. The food grown at Loy Farm can be requested in meals catered by Mill Point Catering, but does not go into the dining halls due to the volume of food that would be needed. “The major avenue [for the food grown on the farm] is campus kitchen,” said Bilecki. “Every week, they cook 200 meals that go out into the community. So, they’re going to two different senior centers or served to the community via allied churches.”
“We are not providing all of the ingredients for those 200 meals per week,” Bilecki added. “But what is grown can be incorporated into those meals.”
Loy Farms is located past the intermural fields on Front Street and is open to all students at any time of day who wish to come and complete fieldwork, do homework at a picnic table or to enjoy the scenery.
If students wish to volunteer, they should contact the student coordinator Allison Hren at ahren@elon.edu.
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