Growers Visit Campus Farm, Award Scholarships

An Orange County farming organization visited Cal Poly Pomona earlier this month to tour the campus farm and to award $1,000 scholarships to four students.

The Orange County chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers has annually awarded scholarships to plant science students for more than 20 years.

In the past, the students and their faculty would attend the organization’s October meeting in Santa Ana to receive the scholarships.

But this year the Orange County Rare Fruit Growers asked Associate Professor Aaron Fox if they could come to Cal Poly Pomona to present the scholarships and tour the campus farm.

Fox gave them a tour on Nov. 12 that included visits to the greenhouses at AGRIscapes and the coffee orchards, where two of the scholarship recipients, Riley Holmes and Phillip Callahan, work. Holmes is a senior plant science major, while Callahan is a first-year master’s degree student in agriculture.

Other scholarship recipients were Richard Preston and Amy Johnson, both seniors in plant science.

It was the first time in three years that the organization was able to meet scholarship recipients in person.