Farm to School: How California is Revolutionizing School Lunches
August 13, 2024
If you’re eating lunch at an Azusa Unified School District cafeteria, and you think your orange tastes extra sweet, you’re not wrong. That’s a benefit of buying local oranges grown on trees that are more than a century old. “The older the tree, the sweeter the orange,” says Anna Nakamura-Knight, whose family has farmed citrus trees in Redlands, CA for five generations.
Anna’s farm does more than provide delicious fresh fruit to school districts like Azusa Unified. As a part of Old Grove Orange, they offer education and enrichment for students about food, agriculture, and the environment through a farm to school program.
The result is a program that benefits everyone, creating healthier and stronger futures for kids, schools, farmers and communities.
- Helping Kids: School Food Professionals that operate farm to school programs can get their students to eat delicious, just-harvested produce while learning about where their food comes from. Research shows that kids who engage with farm to school programs eat more fruits and vegetables, are more willing to try healthy foods, get more physical activity, and even do better in class. “Doing this gives us a unique opportunity to cultivate the palate of a child,” Anna says. “We get to create this healthy, wonderful, rich relationship with food where they know where an orange comes from, how it grows and what it really tastes like.”
- Helping Schools: Schools that participate in farm to school see greater meal participation, healthier meal options, greater support from parents, and reduced food waste. Best of all, School Food Professionals get access to fresh, healthy ingredients which can form the basis of nutritious, scratch-cooked meals. “We work with all sorts of school programs, from once-a-month, harvest-of-the-month features to weekly deliveries,” Anna says. “Our farmers even go into schools to teach students about healthy food choices and how produce is grown.”
- Helping Farmers: Farm to school purchases directly support farmers, keeping them in business and allowing them to keep producing fresh, local fruits and vegetables in their communities. The impact is huge, making up a sizable percentage of incomes for farmers participating in farm-to-school programs and pouring more than a billion dollars every year into these vital local businesses. “It makes such an economic difference for farmers. School purchases from our farm enabled my parents to pay for my and my brother’s college educations,” Anna says. “The food dollars schools spend support whole farming families, and those farms are in your community.”
- Helping Communities: When schools purchase food from local farmers, it keeps those dollars local, where they can stimulate the economy, create local jobs, strengthen families and generate more prosperity for everyone. “What’s magical is that, not only are you giving kids the most nutritious, delicious produce that they can get, but you’re supporting local families and building up the economy of your whole community.”
Anna is excited to see how farm to school has grown throughout California. Schools across the state have made a greater commitment to working with small farmers in their communities, supported by state programs like the California Farm to School Incubator Grant Program, Local Food for Schools, and School Food Best Practices Funds.
She sees the movement as the intersection of past and future, upholding the long tradition of local farms while making a tangible difference in the lives of kids. “I want children to benefit from fresh, healthy food and small farmers to be able to keep farming forever,” Anna said.