Dilmun Hill Student Farm

100+ Cornell students, faculty, staff, alumni, and Ithaca community members came to the farm to celebrate Dilmun Hill's 30th anniversary. Guests sampled tomatoes and strawberries, learned about projects at the farm and picked flowers to create their own bouquets. The celebration continued with food and live music. 

For three decades, generations of students have learned by doing, worked together, experimented, made mistakes, developed leadership skills, and shared fresh food with the Cornell community.

Here’s to the students who started it all, everyone who helped the farm grow, and the generations who will continue caring for this land. Happy 30th anniversary, Dilmun Hill!

We welcomed more than 60 participants to our field day “Spawn, Seedlings, and Silvopasture: Agroforestry at Dilmun Hill," where we explored how agroforestry practices can build resilient, productive, and sustainable farming systems. Guest speakers shared their expertise and passion throughout the evening. Visitors learned about:

• Agroforestry Design🌳
• Log-Grown Mushrooms🍄
• Pawpaw Production🌿
• Air-Pruned Raised Beds🌱
• Silvopasture Practices🐑

Pawpaw expert and Cornell alum Bob Meadows recently taught the 2026 student managers how to graft pawpaws – a tropical-tasting fruit native to North America. Grafting involves attaching the rootstock of trees with unknown/less desirable characteristics to the budding branches of cultivars with more desirable characteristics. In June the seedlings began to leaf out, and in July we fertilized and repotted them. We’ll plant these this coming winter so that future students can enjoy the fruits of even more abundant trees!

In recent years, we've been harvesting over 150 lbs. of fruit annually from the pawpaw trees planted at Dilmun in 1999. Since we don’t know their cultivars, we are documenting characteristics like fruit size and canopy cover, and mapping the orchard to determine where the best spots for our grafts will be.

We’ve been regularly producing beautiful shiitake mushrooms from the 130 logs we inoculated in 2024 and 2025 at Dilmun’s annual Hill Day event! Following inoculation, we let the hardwood logs rest for a year to allow the shiitake spawn to colonize and reliably produce mushrooms for years to come. To force a flush, we soak them for 24 hours, wait 7-10 days, then harvest the mature mushrooms. 

They are often available throughout summer and fall during our CSA pick-ups, at our farm stands on campus, and at Anabel’s Grocery, Cornell’s student-run grocery store.

Have you ever heard of honeyberries? Also called haskaps, these supersized (~1 inch long) raisin-shaped fruits in the honeysuckle family have a mixed-berry flavor that depends on the variety. While uncommon in the US, they are popular in China, Japan, and Slavic cultures, and are well-suited to Dilmun’s environment.

In 2025, we planted 42 individual bushes of 6 cultivars- Boreal Beast, Boreal Beauty, Boreal Blizzard, Indigo Gem, Indigo Treat, and Tundra- arranged to promote pollination and extend our harvest season. While they won’t be ready to eat this summer, look forward to seeing these in future CSA shares and markets!

Indigenous communities are some of the most food insecure populations in the USA and are often geographically separated from their traditional foods. This project uses container-based gardening and freely available fertilizers, such as human waste, fish effluent, and black soldier fly frass, to grow culturally relevant foods and ceremonial tobacco. Seeds are returned to members of the Haudenosaunee through the American Indian & Indigenous Studies Program.

One of the high tunnels is dedicated to a research project that seeks to recycle nutrients from human and agricultural waste into fertilizer. Connecting sanitation and agriculture in this way can add valuable nutrients to the soil where they are needed.

• Grow as you go: 'Peecycling' helps plants & compost thrive
• Recycling human waste for a more prosperous planet

From planning which crops to grow and tending them throughout the season, to harvesting – growing food is our passion. We love to experiment with novel crops and methods, and to share our abundant harvest with the Cornell community. 

Look for our produce at Anabel's Grocery, visit our market stand on campus, or check out our CSA and u-pick options.