FRESNO, Calif. — Farmers at Fresno State have answered every child's wish: They grow a vegetable that tastes like candy.
Sweet, buttery, crunchy. Every day the university sells 10,000 to 30,000 ears of super-sugary corn grown on its campus farm smack in the middle of this Central Valley city.
People line up for it at the university's Gibson Farm Store, helping to make it one of the most profitable student markets in the nation.
"I know they take good care with everything because they're students," said shopper Judy Rose, who drives 70 minutes round trip several times a month during corn season.
In some neighborhoods, residents take turns going on "corn runs." At dinner parties the corn can constitutes dessert. Others don't even bother to cook it.
Agriculture laboratory director Ganesan Srinivasan expects to sell 1 million ears by the middle of next month, and even more by the season's end in September. Placed end to end the ears would stretch from the California State University, Fresno campus, over mountains and long highways to Monterey on the coast. That's up from 250,000 ears for the entire Memorial-to-Labor-Day season five years ago when both he and the hybrid Vision variety were new to campus and the finished product wasn't as incredibly addictive.
By reducing tilling, fine-tuning applications of water and nitrogen, picking each ear at dawn by hand at optimum ripeness, immediately chilling it to 38-degrees to stop sugars from turning to starches, and selling it just a few hours later, Srinivasan has created an insatiable demand.
"It's like the Goldilocks story— we don't pick it or sell it until it's just right," said Srinivasan, who has spent his career studying corn and its grain kin maize in Mexico, the U.S. and his native India.
It's part of the university's mission to teach its 1,200 ag students to not just grow things — but to cultivate quality products and to find niches to market them. The day in June that school officials tweeted it would go on sale, all 10,000 ears were snapped up in fewer than two hours.
"When we made the announcement, there was a mad rush," Srinivasan said, describing a scene in which customers grappled around bins for position.
Also at Fresno State milk becomes ice cream and cheese. Spanish and Greek olives are crushed into extra virgin oil. Grapes grown by enology students are fermented into wine. Table grapes are dried into raisins then coated in chocolate. Pistachios and almonds are roasted and packaged, or mixed with chili and lemon. Plums, peaches and nectarines are picked daily, sold fresh or made into jelly. Pomegranates are stewed into syrup. Tomatoes are vine ripened.
The advantage the school farm has — besides its urban location — is that the variety of products grown year-round in California's temperate climate cannot be matched anywhere else in the country.
"They are in such a good agriculture area," said Gary Kennedy, head of agriculture sciences at Louisiana Tech University, where student sales of watermelons, starter vegetable plants and ornamental plants are a $600,000 a year enterprise. "They've got a good ag program."
At 33-cents an ear, corn helps drive sales of other products grown and raised on the university's 1,057-acre sandy loamy oasis in Fresno's most heavily trafficked business and residential district. The farm earned $4.5 million in the fiscal year just ended, twice as much as the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Nearly $1.5 million of Fresno's sales were direct to locals, the rest to milk, nut and cotton processors.
Well more than a half million dollars of store receipts were rung up in $4 increments as direct sales of corn, slightly less than the total Texas Tech earns from its famous meat. Market leader wine, at $6 to $20 a bottle, accounts for four percent more of the Fresno store's total sales, but far less by volume.
In an era of diminishing higher education budgets, the success of the farm program has become a model for other universities — and a way to equip students with the latest technology.
A new milking parlor, a $75,000 bladder press for the winery and a tractor equipped with a laser-guidance GPS system are among the purchases that otherwise might not have been made. It means that students graduate proficient on the latest equipment.
"It's good to be able to see what it's all about," said Bailey Vanderpoel, as she tested cows for mastitis before hooking them to computerized milking machines that record the production of each of the 150 herd members.
Business is so brisk at the 1,200-square-foot store that the daughter of the late Rue and Gwen Gibson donated $1.5 million to build a new market that will double the space by next year. It's a far cry from the roadside stand from which students began selling produce in 1984.
Srinivasan's revenue stream has not gone unnoticed by his peers. His success at figuring new ways for student to grow and raise products earned him a spot as a featured speaker this fall at the annual meeting of the American Society of Agronomy in Texas.
"Our primary and most important product is students -- and not the sweet corn or wine we sell," Srinivasan wrote in an email when he worried he hadn't made the point enough. "These are bi-products of training our students to get a world-class education in agriculture."