A new coalition of educators is forming to find more ways to serve local-grown foods in schools.
The Montgomery County Farm-to-School Group, which is expected to convene in early 2020, will work with Purdue Extension’s local foods team to connect with local farmers and put more school gardens in the ground.
“I truly believe at the end of the day, you show them it can be done without putting a huge brick on their back and then when they taste the difference and what they’ve produced for that student and the sense of pride in the production, I think you could start a wildfire with that,” Wabash College executive chef Jason Anderson said during the Montgomery County Local Food Summit.
Local teachers, members of the Montgomery County Master Gardeners program and community volunteers gathered Wednesday at Fusion 54 to drum up support for local farm-to-school activities.
The movement is gaining traction. Students at Crawfordsville Middle School are served seasonal vegetable lunches featuring local
produce. Nicholson Elementary’s cafeteria received approval this year to serve food from the school’s garden.
At Hoover Elementary, nutrition and exercise lessons are offered through the Fuel Up to Play 60 program, which is supported by the National Football League. Children have also worked alongside Master Gardeners at the Crawfordsville Community Garden.
Nationwide, nearly 43,000 schools were participating in farm-to-school activities across more than 5,200 districts in 2015, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The local foods team donated herb garden kits this fall to more than 20 Montgomery County teachers, who are using the herbs “partly as a science experiment but also as a local foods demo,” said team member Ashley Adair, a Purdue Extension educator.
“So growing small-scale in the classroom and showing other teachers how that is possible,” Adair said.
Allowing small farmers to compete with larger distributors for school vendor contracts and convincing consumers to purchase more local foods is key to expanding the movement, said Jessica Roosa, president of Colfax-based This Old Farm, which processes, markets and distributes locally raised food.
“Everybody says local food is a great idea but when it comes to actually making the purchase, for whatever reason that buy-in is not all the way there,” Roosa said. “They’re not quite ready.”
