Area produce makes return to kids’ trays

Schools slow to grow on plan

Monday, November 19, 2012

Curt Rom’s father planted an orchard that once supplied fresh, locally grown apples to Fayetteville schools, not just the standard Red Delicious variety but also Golden Delicious and Jonagold.

That ended with changes in the food industry in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The Fayetteville School District food service department, like many other institutions and grocery stores, stopped buying locally grown apples and instead purchased apples from national vendors that could supply them throughout theyear at a cheaper price than a local farmer could, said Rom, a professor in the Department of Horticulture at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Now, decades later, Adam Simmons, food service director for the Fayetteville School District, is working to get locally grown foods back into the schools.

“What we’re trying to do is make it almost a model. Just with a little manipulation, it could be used anywhere in the state,” he said.

Fayetteville’s efforts to provide local foods to children contributed to the dis-trict receiving one of two U.S. Department of Agriculture grants awarded to Arkansas projects. The second grant went to the Lawrence County School District in northeast Arkansas.

The USDA awarded a total of $4.5 million in grants for 68 projects in 37 states and the District of Columbia in a new “Farm to School” program established by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.

Fayetteville Public Schools received $99,058 to develop a comprehensive farm-toschool program that will provide training and improve food-processing capacity to ensure that local products are regularly on school menus throughout the school year, according to the USDA.

“It’s really hard just with all the USDA regulations we have to meet,” said Simmons, past president of the Arkansas School Nutrition Association. “It puts a lot of pressure on these food service directors. There’s really not a model that’s sustainable in our area.”

CHANGES REQUIRED

Using Arkansas-grown foods requires some changes in cafeterias’ usual practices, Simmons said. For example, some food service directors write out menus for the entire school year in August. Simmons changes the Fayetteville menus six times a year to take advantage of seasonal crops.

Simmons has a chef ’s background, and when he entered school food service six years ago, he said, he wondered why schools didn’t serve more locally grown fruits and vegetables. He started working to change that while employed in Farmington and continued when he became the director at Fayetteville.

“We have good crops around here on farms,” he said.

With the new grant, Simmons plans to enlist chefs to train food service employees in preparation of such locally grown produce as turnips.

“The turnip is not something we would normally use,” Simmons said. “It’s not too kid-friendly.”

Simmons plans to purchase equipment that will allow for cooking in smaller quantities and for quickly freezing harvested crops.

“Interestingly in the last decade, we’ve realized what we lost - our local farms,” said Rom, who has assisted in Simmons’ efforts. “We lost part of our heritage, our local culture and our economy.There’s been this re-awakening of local foods.”

Rom’s father planted the orchard in 1966 and 1967. By the mid-1970s, his father’s business plan changed from selling to institutions and supermarkets to a “pick your own” operation. In 1995, the business changed to selling apples at the farmers market. His father stopped farming in 2010.

LAWRENCE COUNTY GRANT

The Lawrence County School District, with 1,125 students, received a $45,000 planning grant to head a project that will include the Hoxie School District, with about 870 students, and the Sloan-Hendrix School District, with about 660 students, said Rhonda Fowler, career and technical education coordinator for the Northeast Arkansas Education Service Cooperative.

Williams Baptist College in Walnut Ridge also is assisting in the project, offering the use of its greenhouse for experimenting and planning, she said.

The goal is to build a greenhouse at one school that will involve agriculture students growing lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers, and students in business classes selling excess produce at farmers markets, with the profits going back into the greenhouse operation, Fowler said. Foods grown in thegreenhouse could also contribute to the salad bars in the schools, she said.

GOING BACK TO LOCAL

From the time the National School Lunch program began in the 1940s until about the 1960s, school meals consisted primarily of regionally grown foods, said Rochelle Davis, president and chief executive for the Healthy Schools Campaign, a national nonprofit organization based in Chicago. Changes in food economics in the 1970s and 1980s, and increased regulation of school meals led schools to shift to nationally procured foods.

“We’re trying to go back to what it might have looked like in the ’40s and ’50s,” Davis said.

The movement back to locally grown foods is affecting schools across the country, she said.

“Fruit and vegetable consumption is very low in kids,” Davis said. “You’re helping students be more open to eating those fruits and veggies.”

In Chicago, the push for locally grown foods led that city’s public schools last year to purchase $2.5 million in fresh and quickly frozen produce from regional farms, Davis said. The school district also established a partnership with Amish farms in Indiana to provide locally raised, vegetarian-fed chicken products at least once a month.

In Arkansas, few school districts have committed to putting locally grown foods on lunch trays. The USDA received just five applications for the new Farm to School grant program, said Deborah Kane, the program’s national director.

But, some schools in the state have made the effort.

Becky Cisco, the food service director for Eureka Springs School District, used to go to the farmers market every week to buy produce for the salad bar. She had to stop going after she broke her knee and is retiring thisyear.

“You have to make the effort,” she said. “You have to go get it.”

But the Fort Smith School District, with 14,000 students, is not participating in a farm-to-school program because the district is not close enough to farms that could produce enough to feed the thousands of children who eat lunches there, spokesman Zena Featherston said.

‘PRICE AND VOLUME’

David Dickey is growing strawberries on three-quarters of an acre at DickeyFarms, west of Tontitown, as a spring crop for the Fayetteville School District. Most of the Dickey Farms produce is sold at the Fayetteville Farmers Market, though the farm also has a “pick your own” pumpkin patch in the fall.

Dickey began working with the school district last spring, providing not only strawberries but also grapes and apples. He likes the idea of local foods in schools, but there are challenges, he said.

Farmers have to charge a higher price to realize any profit, and school districtsoften find better prices on the wholesale market, Dickey said. In Arkansas, most fruits and vegetables are harvested from April through November, Dickey said. Expanding that growing season would be expensive.

Farmers also have to weigh whether they can afford to meet all of the federal regulations in supplying foods to schools, Dickey said.

“It all comes down to price and volume,” Dickey said. “The school, in general, uses a huge volume of food. The problem is the cost of production is so high.”

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 11/19/2012