Dinah Mack:

Welcome to Farm to School Northeast, a podcast where we explore the creative ways that local food is getting into school cafeterias and how food system education is playing out in classrooms and school gardens across the northeast. While farm to school programs exist across the country and throughout the northeast, for some the term, farm to school might not be familiar, and for others, a definition might be a little hard to pin down. In this short introduction to our monthly podcast series, before we jump into exciting farm to school stories happening across the northeast, we wanted to create a common understanding. What exactly does farm to school mean? For some answers we asked a variety of people who work in farm to school in different capacities to describe what exactly farm to school means to them. Whether defined by a school garden coordinator, a classroom teacher or administrator, a food service director, a policy maker, farmer or food justice activist. You will definitely hear some common language and themes as we dig in to find a definition of farm to school.

Betsy Rosenbluth:

My name is Betsy Rosenbluth. I am the Farm to School Director at Shelburne Farms and the Co-Director of our Farm to school and farm to early childhood programs called Through Vermont Feed. I also facilitate the Northeast Farm to School Collaborative. Shelburne Farms is a nonprofit that has a mission to cultivate and inspire learning for sustainable future, and I think food is the way to get at these big concepts of sustainability through something we all relate to. We all in some way are interacting with food and the food system, and students are aware of a lot of big issues in the world today, whether it's the climate crisis or food insecurity, or racism and immigration, or just their own physical and mental health challenges. And farm to school is a way to connect the dots and address- help to address and think about solutions to these challenges through the food system.

So I would describe Farm to School as making food real. It's connecting students to where food comes from and what it does for them, for their bodies and for their communities and their local economies. It’s making sure they have healthy food and enough food and they know how to grow it, and cook it and what happens to waste. And that the food on their plate is tied to energy and poverty and land and water and social justice and so many other global issues. But most important, what is their own place in that system? And that's what we really like to emphasize. How can they create change in that system? So around 30 million students eat national school lunch, so it's this critical opportunity to feed hungry kids and an opportunity to shape how kids and adults will eat in the future. And we have a model of change we call the three Cs. How can we connect in a school community, the classroom, the cafeteria, and the community in order to create a culture of wellness in that school? And so through curriculum and the food that is served and the opportunity to taste new things and to have place-based learning in their community, that three C model is the way that we approach Farm to school.

Ernie Koschmieder:

My name is Ernie Koschmieder. Welcome folks. I'm right here in Groton, Connecticut. I've been here at Groton Public Schools as the Food Service Director and now slash Farm to Table Director as well for 13 years, and our Farm to school program really has started to really blossom over the last five years. It's really taken shape and just has exploded and I just love it so much for our families, for our kids. This is what every school district in the country should be doing. How I define Farm to school simply is this: I look- as a food service director, I can sit behind a computer screen, I can order apples, I can order celery, broccoli from a broadline distributor, produce that who knows where it comes from across the United States.The one good thing is that because I'm a USDA person is I have to buy domestic product, but when you buy more locally sourced things, what you're doing is you're now able to tell your families and your students, Hey, look, I'm purchasing stuff that's within five, ten miles of our school, itt's organically grown. I know what the conditions are of this food that's coming in for our kids. That's the huge part there. Like I say, it's a no brainer. I could sit here and just order broccoli, blip blip blip, within five minutes it's done. But to search out and to keep my dollars local, helping my state and my local towns, and that's what it really means.

Rebecca Kelley:

My name is Rebecca Kelly. I use she/her pronouns, and I'm the Impact Partnerships Lead for Massachusetts and Rhode Island at Food Corp. And Food Corp is a national nonprofit that partners with AmeriCorps to put service members in schools to teach kids about food and nutrition in gardening in the classrooms, cafeteria, and all part of a larger effort to connect kids with the joy and power of food. So this work feels really important to me because I really care about a holistic education for kids that allows them these kinds of hands-on experiences with food that allow them ultimately to have autonomy. I want kids at the end of the day to feel empowered with the knowledge that they have, with these hands-on experiences, to be able to make choices for themselves about the kinds of food that they enjoy eating that's nourishing, that will heal them. They will understand how different foods interact with their bodies and not just understand it from we did a worksheet, but understand it because they got to try the food and they got to try making things.

And so that's why this work, I feel really connected to this work and it continues to engage me because every time I get the opportunity to go visit a school and see the incredible work that the Food Corp service members are doing with the kids, it's just like it's incredible. I want that to keep happening, and I want that for everybody. That shouldn't just be some places they can afford to do it or because an organization like Food Corp is able to have capacity to be able to help them, I do want districts to be able to help themselves and help their children to be able to have access to this education in that way. And so that's why I'm so engaged with this work and why I continue to want to be a part of it.

Denise Courtney:

My name is Denise Courtney. I work for the Office for Food Nutrition Programs at the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in Massachusetts. My role is a Nutrition Education and School Wellness Training Coordinator, and I have the privilege of supporting work around farm to school and helping school nutrition professionals integrate local food, nutrition education, school gardens, within their operation of the National School Lunch program. Some of the work that I do is helping school nutrition professionals understand the opportunities that are available within the child nutrition program federal regulations to incorporate ingredients from local producers in their meals, helping them to understand how that really connects meals and students to their community. Also helping them to sort of empower their work around school gardens or taste tests, giving kids access to tasting some of this really great locally grown or even school garden grown food. And then I think thirdly, we've been really fortunate to have a lot of federal and state support around grant funding to directly support farm to school work in schools and in early education settings, and also for the procurement of local food. So I help to sort of administratively make sure that all that money gets to people who are really doing the incredible work throughout all of our communities.

Lisa Damon:

My name is Lisa Damon and I am Co-Director at Massachusetts Farm To School. When I think about farm to school, I think about community and I also think about local producers and farmers. When our organization was founded 20 years ago, it was an initiative really focused on supporting local agricultural economies here in Massachusetts and helping farmers access school customers. And over the 20 years, we've really seen our organization grow and expand the work to include farm to school in the classroom setting, school gardens, and working with numerous other organizations and community groups. But our work is still rooted in supporting a local food system, a healthy local food system and producers here in the northeast. We see farmers connecting with schools in all different ways. We see farmers delivering their produce through a third party or a local distributor so they can access schools throughout the state. We see farmers delivering food directly to schools and dropping it off for the cafeteria to use and incorporate into their menus. And then we also see farmers maybe having a deeper partnership with schools and delivering produce or local foods, but also maybe doing taste tests or working with a classroom teacher to do education or maybe hosting field trips. And so that relationship can look really different from community to community, but it's really about making connections and supporting the local producers and the communities of the schools and the farmers.

Lonnie Austin: 

Hello, my name is Lonnie Austin. I run and own Austin Ridge Acres in Belchertown, Mass with my husband Daniel. This year we are celebrating 10 years of business as a small family farm. We have several things going on at Austin Ridge Acres, one of them being that we raise beef cattle. The other is that we also grow and harvest all of the feed that we feed to our cows, and we also sell some of that feed to neighboring farmers. We're fortunate to have a farm store that is open daily with beef, pork and our farm fresh eggs. We are located at 241 Bardwell Street. Farm to School is important to our farm and our family by giving us the opportunity to supply and sell our farm raised beef to the schools in our neighborhood and our surrounding towns. It gives us pride knowing that we play a role in schools, offering healthier options to their students. Being a part of the Farm to School has personally helped us as a small family farm by providing another outlet to sell our beef and in return is helping us to cover costs of operations in our off season.

Dana Hudson: 

My name is Dana Hudson and I work for Shelburne Farms in Vermont, and I coordinate the Vermont Farm to School and Early Childhood Network. And I've been working in farm to school work for about 20 years. Farm to School is the light of hope. It is a way of thinking, it's a way of tackling a huge host of challenges we have ahead of us that I think is a strategy and an action that people can get behind, which again, is addressing water and land and food consumption and injustices and education and sustainability and that I always have felt that the term farm to school isn't the right term, but it's the best term we have. It casts a wide net just looking at who's involved in the work. Everyone's here for different reasons. Someone might be here because they really care about children's nutrition. Someone else is here because they worry about farm viability. There are people that are here because they were hungry as children and they want to make sure people aren't hungry. There are people here that are more concerned about climate and sustainability. And so the fact that it draws, it's such a big umbrella that draws so many people in, and it really is the most powerful beginning of how to make change if we want to change the food system as a whole. We see how all these things come together and because it's looking at the next generation, it feels like there's hope in it. And so I really believe the Farm to School is the path forward to really rectify a lot of the broken elements of our food system.

Dinah Mack: 

This podcast is a production of the Northeast Farm to School Collaborative. For more information about this podcast or farm to school in the northeast, go to northeastfarmto school.org