Farm-to-school program nourishes students, community
oquet Valley Central School District students know where their cafeteria food comes from because they had a hand in growing it.
Last year, Boquet’s third-, fourth- and fifth-graders helped plant a school garden so they could harvest fresh herbs and vegetables for the school’s pesto pasta, coleslaw, and pumpkin crunch. This year, the students and their families helped establish a chicken flock to get a steady supply of fresh eggs for baking and breakfast.
The garden and chickens are part of Boquet’s ongoing commitment to local foods; the district sources 31 percent of its ingredients from local farms.
“We always source a farm first,” said cook Sasha Pulsifer, a member of the Boquet Valley Support Staff Association, who heads up the garden project. “For one, it tastes better. It’s fresher. It’s usually more nutrient-dense because it was picked a few days ago, not shipped across the country.”
Boquet Valley is one of Champlain Valley Educational Services BOCES’s nine component districts participating in the New York State Farm-to-School Program and the 30% NYS Initiative, a local food incentive that increases lunch reimbursements from 5.9 cents to 25 cents for districts that source at least 30 percent of their ingredients from New York farms and producers.
The biggest reason to make the switch from global food systems to local is, of course, student health.
“The closer in proximity, the more nutrition stays in the product,” said Julie Holbrook, shared food services director for Champlain Valley Educational Services, who manages the food programs for the nine participating districts. “The closer from the field to your stomach you get, the more nutrition you’re going to get.”
“It’s great for our economy,” said Joseph Kilmer, regional director of food service for Greater Southern Tier BOCES, who manages food programs for 20 component districts participating in the initiative. “We keep the tax dollars focused on New York and New York jobs, and it’s also good for the kids because prior to this it was hard for me to even get apple juice from the USA.”
Thanks to the farm-to-cafeteria program, Kilmer said, he has been able to increase his NY purchases from $600,000 to $2.1 million over the course of the last seven years; that kind of buying power has encouraged farms in his districts to expand their product lines to meet school needs, including one local farm that now makes apple juice and applesauce for Kilmer’s 28,000 students. “That’s massive and it has an impact on people beyond just the school district,” said Kilmer.
To find vendors, districts use the NY Food Product Database, an inventory of NY farms and products. The list is created and maintained by Cornell Cooperative Extension – Harvest NY, with input from departments of Agriculture and Markets and Education.
The database contains everything from apples to yogurt, along with contact information for providers. But participating districts can also forge their own relationships with local farms and funnel those relationships back to the database.
That’s what Zach Zarling does.
Zarling is the school lunch manager at Peru Central School District, which sources 36 percent of its food locally, including beef, cheese, yogurt, maple syrup and apples.
“I had multiple people come up to me at the Farm-to-School Summit this year and ask, ‘How do you start that? How do you get more local food in?’” Zarling recalls. “I said, ‘Do you know the farmers in the area?’ No? Go talk to your farmers.’”
Zarling said negotiating deals with small farms and coordinating deliveries from multiple vendors can be more complicated than ordering from a single-source vendor like Sysco or US Foods, but it’s ultimately more rewarding for him and his staff.
“They take pride in the fact that they’re feeding students whole food, food that they know where it comes from,” said Zarling.
Pulsifer agrees. “We have lots of kids who will come in for seconds, and that always makes you feel good because you know that it is actually something that we made,” said Pulsifer, “and we made it from local healthy ingredients.”
