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CITY, N.D. (NewsDakota.com) North Dakota charitable food programs will benefit from the efforts of the Valley City State University freshman class, which will harvest squash and other produce for distribution by the Great Plains Food Bank.

On Thursday, Sept. 24, VCSU students in the freshman Learning to Live, Living to Learn class will be bused to a farm northwest of Valley City owned by Dan Faust, a retired Lutheran pastor, who grows squash and other vegetables for the Great Plains Food Bank, a program of Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota.

The group of more than 200 freshmen and their upper-class mentors, together with a group of community volunteers organized by Faust, will pick the produce and load it into semi-trailers for distribution by the food bank, which serves community food programs such as food pantries and soup kitchens throughout the state.

In 2014, volunteers harvested more than 33,000 pounds of produce for the Great Plains Food Bank on the Faust farm.