Getting Local Food Into Schools

Kate N. Nichols is a Bellingham resident interested in local, sustainable living.

Parents and other advocates have been working to eliminate unhealthy food and snacks at Whatcom County public schools for years. Now grassroots efforts have joined farmers and school administrators who started the process to get healthy, local food back into schools.

The reality of the corporate food system that grips the United States makes it difficult to get local food into the school market. Since 1946, the National School Lunch Program has provided food for more than 30 million children across the country, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Web site.

In an unlikely partnership, the Department of Defense supplies foods they have purchased to support farm prices to schools. Food Service of America, whose partners include corporations such as Campbell’s, Cargill, General Mills and ConAgra Foods, supplies most of the food for school lunches.

On July 1, 2008, the Washington State Legislature started to push back and adopted the Local Farms-Healthy Kids Act to make it easier for local farmers to get their products into schools. Schools no longer have to use the cheapest food. The act also provides grants to supply local fruits and snacks for kids at some low-income schools, and it creates and funds technical assistance to school districts and farms to help them iron out supply, processing and purchasing issues.

Of the $550 million in food consumed in a year by Whatcom County residents, only 1 to 3 percent is produced locally, according to Jeff Voltz, the Whatcom County project manager for Northwest Agriculture Business Center (NABC).

Voltz said he sees his role as creating a demand and a pipeline for locally produced food. He is interviewing the food service administrators at Whatcom Community College and Bellingham Technical College. Those schools are big enough buyers to make a difference for farmers, Voltz said. He said he believes the collaborative efforts will result in all schools being able to buy more local food.

“It’s a brave new world where society is evolving to eat off the local land,” Voltz said.

One of the farm programs delivering food to schools is Growing Washington, which its director, Clayton Burrows, started in 2004 as his final project in graduate school. The cooperative is a nonprofit owned by farmers. The farmers operate five self-sustaining farms, including one that grows food for the local food bank. Growing Washington just started delivering local food to Western Washington University.

The cooperative is unusual because it is self-supporting.

“Whatever market or new aspect of farming interests the farmers, we pencil it out to make sure it is self-sustaining,” Burrows said. “The cooperative works in part because of the strong peer relationship that Growing Washington’s farmers maintain with other local farmers.”

This allows farmers from the two groups to work together to fulfill large school orders.

When Gretchen Hoyt and Ben Craft decided to “retire” after 35 years of farming Alm Hills Gardens in Everson, they looked at alternatives to selling their farm. Working with members of Growing Washington, Holt and Craft came up with a solution. Now they farm the winter tulip crop and in the spring, lease the farm to Growing Washington farmers.

In addition to young college graduates learning to farm, six skilled Latino workers who work on the farm year-round continue their work as members of Growing Washington. Burrows has worked at Alm Hill Gardens a total of six seasons and has been in charge for three.

Dorie and John Belisle are other local farmers who sell their produce to Whatcom County schools. The Belisles own BelleWood Acres apple farm north of Bellingham. Dorie Belisle approached her daughter’s school in the Mount Baker School District several years ago, and they have sold apples to schools since then.

Income from schools is a small but important part of their income, Dorie Belisle said. Unfortunately, because of tight school budgets, only 20 cents of the dollar allotted for each student lunch is allowed for fruit.

The story of the Belisle’s business exemplifies the problems facing many small farmers. Dorie Belisle explained that their original business plan was to sell their apples to the large Eastern Washington wholesalers. So they planted the Gala apples the wholesalers wanted, but when it came time to sell their apples, the wholesalers set the prices so low that Belisles couldn’t make enough money to sustain their farm.

Now the Belisles plant different apple varieties, including ones that produce small, fist-sized apples for schools. They built their own facilities and have three packing lines to wash, sort and box apples. They also bought the trucks to haul them. The more apples and products they sell locally to restaurants and grocery stores and directly from their farm store, the better off they are financially.

Another complication of the local market is the seasonality of growing food. Although Whatcom County has a mild, maritime climate, apples are available only through early January at the latest. Since the school year starts in September, the Belisles can sell apples to schools only for about 10 weeks of the year.

“Seasonality requires a paradigm shift in the way we eat,” said Fred Berman, the Washington State Department of Agriculture Small Farm Program Coordinator. Berman was a farmer who supplied food to his restaurant Pastazza in addition to contributing to the creation of the Bellingham Farmers’ Market, so he knows the practicalities of growing, distributing, processing and eating local food.

Eating in season also requires product substitution, Berman said.

“Onions are grown over the summer months and can only be stored through December, but leeks can be grown year-around,” Berman said. Farmers can plant different varieties and types of vegetables sequentially for a year-round supply.

“Although spinach can’t be grown year-round here, chard and kale are valued substitutes and they meet the taster profile,” Berman said. Washington State University has already stepped in and researched and developed recipes so these “substitute” vegetables can be used.

Besides substitution and a longer growing season, preserving local food by canning and freezing could extend its use throughout the school year. Although the schools have limited storage capacity, Cascade Harvest Coalition, a nonprofit out of Seattle, funded the Puget Sound Food Project to survey storage facilities and processing plants in the region.

The research results on their Web site, www.cascadeharvest.org, show some of the facilities in Skagit and Whatcom County are underutilized and may be available to local farmers to store food until schools can use it.

Although the large canneries left the county in the 1980s, berries, dairy, and meat processing is still done here, Hoyt said. Local meat processor Keizer AA Meats in Lynden is ready to supply hamburger patties to schools, Berman said. Furthermore, Voltz said NABC is actively researching how to open a multipurpose plant in Skagit Valley that would process agricultural products.

Burrows said he calls the obstacles of selling local food to schools the two Qs and the two Cs: quality, quantity, consistency, and convenience. Quality and consistency to a food service director means he or she gets an exact USDA-recommended 8-ounce carrot for each student. Schools also need the convenience of already processed food, such as “bullet” carrots.

“Schools are harnessed by their budgets,” Burrows said. “But small farmers are also on tight, tight budgets, and don’t have the efficiency to produce the consistent size that a commercial farmer can. It’s sexy to read about local food in schools, but the hard part is making it happen with all the lifting and hard work and trucking the food.”

Despite the obstacles, Burrows said the most excited food service directors and staff can get local food into schools.

“For the second year, Growing Washington is supplying Auburn School District with potatoes (over 10,000 pounds delivered this fall already), and has also supplied the district with sweet corn, cucumbers, carrots, and sugar snap peas,” Burrows said.

The Auburn School District has received both federal and state grants for purchasing food, but most of the local food purchased is out of the regular school budget and did not require extra funding, said Auburn School District’s Child Nutrition Director Eric Boutin. He said he also gives credit to the cooks who are willing to prepare food, such as oven-baking the potatoes.

Boutin reeled off the bounty of local food that Auburn cooks are serving their students. The district sourced more than 350,000 organic apples in addition to pears, melons, radishes, green beans, corn and carrots with their tops.

Small farmers might not be able to compete easily with larger farms for consistency, but they can offer better service, Burrows said.

“The advantage small farmers have are personal relationships,” Burrows said. “I can talk to the cooks and they can see the crazy, purple bell peppers that I offer. As a local producer, they can call me at 8 o’clock at night.”

Beyond the obstacles of getting local food into schools, how do you entice students to eat the different foods that grow in the winter? Laura Plaut of Common Threads Farm, which provides seed-to-table education programs to everyone, is working on that question. If children are given the choice of a fresh carrot or a bag of chips, which will they choose? Convention says they will probably pick the chips over the carrots.

This brings the parents into the equation. How often do parents serve fresh kale in the late fall, or add leeks to a meal? How many serve rutabaga, which Berman said is a great winter vegetable, but most Americans don’t eat anymore?

Carrots with green tops are proving popular with elementary children in the Auburn School District, Boutin said, so if students are introduced to some of the food, they may prefer it. Plaut is researching what will interest parents and students in eating the produce available during the school year.

One of the ways she is making the connection for students to their food is by working with the Whatcom County School Garden Collective to create gardens at Whatcom County schools.

Plaut said she has been reading up on the history of planting school gardens, which is centuries old. The first school garden for educational purposes was planted in the 1800s. But school gardens dropped out of favor after World War II.

The goal of this project is to educate students about growing their food, Plaut said.

“Students are more willing to eat food they have helped grow,” Plaut said.

One of the grassroots organizations working to get local foods into schools is the Sustainable Whatcom Fund Committee. The committee is a special fund of the Whatcom Community Foundation, staff person Sue Webber said. The purpose of the fund is to reduce barriers for consumers and producers of local food and have committee members advise how the money should be used, Webber said.

“The focus in getting local foods into schools has been two-pronged,” Webber said. “One is working on the marketing aspects with NABC and for Jeff [Voltz] to be talking to farmers. And two, hiring Crossroads Consulting to have conversations with the school districts.”

The intention of these conversations is to discover the resources available and to use these projects as pilot programs, Webber said. They hope to learn how to increase the volume of local food in the schools and make the programs sustainable.

The committee is working with two school projects, one at Sehome High School and one in the Mount Baker School District. It was also instrumental in getting Voltz hired so Whatcom County would have a representative at NABC, Webber said.

Sehome High School is already selling some local products to students: bagels from The Bagelry and Erin Baker’s Breakfast Cookies. In October 2009, for her senior culminating project, Sehome student Susanne Longenecker facilitated conversations with school staff about using local salad greens in the salad bar. But Mark Dalton, Bellingham School District food services manager, was excited about the project and took the next step to expand the idea of getting as much local food as possible into the schools, Webber said.

Right now most of the burden of getting local food into schools falls on the farmers and school staff, Burrows said. Although advocates for local food in schools might visualize the small, organic farmer supplying schools, he said that might not be realistic. Burrows said he believes the medium-sized farms may be better-suited to supplying local food to schools because they are big enough to handle the larger school orders.

Some of the obstacles of getting local food into schools will need to be overcome at the national policy level. One place for advocates to start is writing letters to Congress to get greater funding for the Child Nutrition Act, which is coming up for Congressional review this spring. Advocates need to ask for additional money for school lunches, for protection for children from junk foods in schools and for a stronger link between schools to local farms with greater funding for the Farm to Schools programs.

To get involved with Slow Food USA and their letter-writing campaign, see http://slowfoodusa.org/index.php/campaign/time_for_lunch/get_involved.

It will take energetic community involvement to grow the reality of local foods in schools. §