Leaders of the Pack: Farm-to-School Programs Feed Kids Across the Country

For many kids, this may be their only nutritious meal of the day. Many of the programs are economically viable, and their educational benefits go well beyond healthy eating. Tony Geraci, Baltimore’s dynamic Food Services Director and an architect of the nationwide farm-to-school movement, says, “The product you’re trying to produce isn’t food on a tray. It’s healthy kids ready to learn. The other billions of dollars we’re spending on teachers, books, buses—if they can’t absorb a lesson plan, it’s wasted.”

Opelika, Alabama

In the early 1990s, when Child Nutrition Program Director Melanie Payne banned fried foods from the school cafeterias in Opelika, Alabama, she wasn’t thinking about local foods yet. “We did it for selfish reasons early on,” she admits; they could get government reimbursements for serving a “nutrient-based” diet. From there, Payne worked with school cooks to ditch the traditional ham hocks and bacon for flavoring and try spices and herbs instead.

The Opelika schools now have a reputation as a place that will buy from local farmers: butter beans, peas, tomatoes and especially greens and sweet potatoes. A big part of what makes it work is their association with the New North Florida Cooperative Association, one of eight regional agencies in the National Farm to School Network linking farmers and food services to get local produce into schools. “We don’t have the labor to actually process products from harvest,” says Payne. “For instance, for collard greens, we need them to be prewashed and chopped. Sweet potatoes come in to us peeled and cut, so all we have to do is cook them.” Success with Opelika has spread to more collaborations. Last fall, 25 area school districts ordered green beans together. Local farmers planted accordingly to fill the order, and after the harvest, the cooperative processed the beans.

Photo Credit: Trip Sullivan. Pictured:  Marcus Mosley, Alicia Joyner and Tim Wright

Baltimore, Maryland

In Baltimore the schools aren’t just buying from farmers—they bought the farm. In July, 2008, they took over 33 acres, the site of a long-closed orphanage east of downtown, which had been donated to the school district in 1953 and been in intermittent use as a horticultural project since the 1970s. Tony Geraci says they brought in a herd of goats to clear the land to create Great Kids Farm, partnering with nature rather than using pesticides and bulldozers. Hundreds of people showed up the first weekend to watch. “Kids had never seen anything like this before. It was as though I’d brought a herd of unicorns to Baltimore,” says Geraci. “That spoke volumes to me about the need for kids to be reconnected with nature.”

Working with Baltimore Youth Apprenticeship Program, he put out a call to local students to spend their summer helping the farm get underway for a farm-to-work educational program. Students like high school seniors Tim Wright and Marcus Mosley, who knew nothing about gardening, learned about it during a spring field trip and took to it as interns in the summer of 2009. With guidance from farm manager Greg Strella, they showed up each morning to feed the chickens, clean up after the goats, water seedlings in the greenhouses, and plant and tend several acres of vegetable crops, as well as a fruit orchard. Neither was big on eating vegetables before last summer. “I hated tomatoes,” says Mosley. “Now I eat tomatoes a lot, and squash…I’d never eaten a sweet pepper before but now I’m craving them.” Tim and Marcus have gone on to put urban gardens all over their neighborhood.

Under Geraci’s leadership and drive, the farm is just one aspect of an ambitious food program for a school system where 83.5% of its nearly 85,000 students qualify for free/reduced meals. For starters: school meals which now include local milk, fruits, and vegetables, and schoolyard gardens. In 2010, the district is launching a pilot program to provide free breakfast, lunch and dinner to all students. And as promised, Geraci’s bringing it all in on budget, using local hospitality schools to do the cooking with ingredients grown at the Great Kids Farm, local farms and “hoop” houses—portable greenhouses at the Lake Clifton High School campus, soon to be joined by more at schools across the city.

Photo credit: Great Kids Farm. Pictured: Marcus Mosely, Tim Wright

Willmar, Minnesota

“We’re getting snow today,” says Annette Derouin, Food and Nutrition Services Director for public schools in Willmar, Minnesota. “We’re not getting corn on the cob!” But Derouin says there’s still plenty local to eat even in winter, including dried beans, wild rice, poultry, and dairy products.

School districts around Minnesota are looking to tiny Willmar (2009 population 17,860) for advice. Now five years into making farm-to-school ideas work, Derouin has teamed with the University of Minnesota to create a toolkit others can use–and perhaps avoid the steep learning curve she faced.

The toolkit tackles subjects like finding out what’s in season at the moment in Minnesota, and recipes using those items, to how to get staff and students on board. Many times Derouin has employed her own kids as tasting guinea pigs. “My daughter’s pretty dramatic—she’ll say, “Mom this is nasty!” Recipes also get tried out in the cafeteria, where they are served in paper cups to students. If they like it, they toss the cup into a garbage can with a smiley face on it. If not, the remains go into the can wearing a frown; and the fuller can wins. One big hit: hot dogs made from Minnesota bison. “Anytime they show up on the elementary school menu,” says Derouin, “the middle and high school students request them too.”

New Orleans, Louisiana

Born in 2006, the Rethink New Orelans Schools program has brought together students from across New Orleans to redesign and “rethink” their schools, so many of which were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Their work on cafeteria design and school food has led them to speak at local press conferences and national food conferences–and created a new wave of working activists.

“As far as we know,” says Rethink founder and director Jane Wholey, “this is first time a group of young public-school kids actually kicked off a farm-to-cafeteria drive themselves.” A lot of programs are spear-headed by college students. The Rethinkers? They’re mostly in middle school. But they’re undaunted by taking on broken systems, or reaching far. One of their current goals is to preserve the local shrimp industry by creating a market in the public schools. Students went to the docks to meet with shrimpers, and came to understand that the industry has been devastated by the importing of farmed shrimp from Asia even more than the devastation from hurricanes. The conversation between the Rethinkers and the Recovery School District, which operates half of the schools, are underway and the inclusion of local shrimp have been theoretically agreed to. Once the food contract, now out for bid, is settled, negotiations over the shrimp will resume.

“You learn about these big issues,” says eighth-grader Lucy Tucker. “That little farmers’ market next to my house seems so much more important now than it ever did to me before.”

Photo credit: Colin M. Lenton. Pictured: Rethink press conference on shrimp