Agriculture has been one of the most successful small business segments to help customers shop local. Their efforts—and the enthusiastic response of customers—led the Oxford University Dictionary to name its 2007 word of the year, locavore. Now, according to ongoing research by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a new “local food” channel is helping local farmers find a new locavore market: school lunchrooms.
Background
The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, bipartisan legislation passed in 2010, included the Farm to School Grant Program. The program enables the USDA to offer grants to help schools establish or expand farm-to-school programs.
NPR’s Dan Charles reports, in the audio story below, that the FDA’s census of farm-to-school programs reveals that at least 42,000 schools have participated in the program. Almost $600 million was spent by school districts for local food during the 2013–2014 school year. That’s up almost 50 percent from the previous census, conducted two years earlier, according to the Farm to School Census. (Can’t see the audio player? Click here.)
What’s a locavore school lunch like?
A lunch served by the Yarmouth, Maine, School Department on Sept. 26, 2014, featured Sloppy Joe’s made with Maine beef and local beets, carrots, apples and potato salad. “There’s universal interest in this, and that’s why we’ve seen dramatic increases in sales, and why we think there’s still a lot of upside potential to this,” Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said in an interview with NPR.
Amy Bachman, the manager of procurement at DC Central, the Washington, DC, nonprofit that supplies meals to 10 schools, says buying local food doesn’t take more money, but it does take more time. “We’re not buying just from one vendor,” she says. “We work with 20 or 25 different farms.”
Just the beginning?
Even though 42,000 schools participated in some form of eat local program, that represents less than half of the school districts surveyed. Even those that did promote local food spent, on average, only 20 percent of their dollars on produce that grew close by.
But there are still signs that the program will grow and benefit children, as well as local farmers and ranchers.
Seventy-five percent of respondents with farm to school programs reported at least one of the following positive benefits as a result of participating in farm to school:
17% | Reduced plate waste
28% | Improved acceptance of the healthier school meals
17% | Increased participation in school meals programs
21% | Lower school meal program costs
39% | Increased support from parents and community members for the healthier school meals
According to the USDA, nearly half (47 percent) of all of the school districts surveyed indicated they plan to increase local food purchases in the coming years.