Despite drought, San Diego Unified grows local sourcing program

Procuring fresh persimmons from a local farmer for students to sample at lunchtime are all in a day’s work for Kathryn Spencer, a farm-to-school specialist for San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD). Spencer connects with farmers to secure at least 15 percent of the produce for salad bars and menu items from local sources.  She also oversees the district’s   Harvest of the Month initiative, which features a locally grown fruit or vegetable in schools’ salad bars.  Below, she discusses the challenges in securing produce for the state’s second largest school district, the ways she is expanding the program and advice for districts that want to start sourcing more local produce.

As SDUSD’s farm-to-school specialist, what are some of your day-to-day responsibilities?

I manage all of the fresh produce acquisition for the district. We buy about $4.5 million dollars worth of produce annually and that typically shows up on salad bars, in soup bowls and as side vegetables. Another one of my focuses is working with local farmers to bring in local products on a monthly basis.

One of SDUSD’s initiatives is to provide locally grown produce to schools. Considering that SDUSD is the second largest school district in California, what are some of the challenges in supplying such a large district?

A lot of the challenge in working with the growers is to clearly communicate expectations and to have an idea of what our volume is going to be and if they can honestly meet that.

Sometimes [farmers’ ability] to scale can be a challenge, so when we’re featuring an item [for Harvest of the Month], we look for growers who can have items that would work well with our salad bar model, can be served raw and would be minimally processed through our kitchens. For instance, one of the growers that we worked with is a tropical fruit grower and we pretty much took every pound of [persimmons] that he had at his farm.

In general, if we communicate what our needs are and they can actually meet them, we haven’t had a problem in terms of matching our needs with the right kind of farm.

How are you affected by Southern California’s drought?

Locally, the growers that we’ve been working with, they’ve been working through these challenges and have been able to keep producing. I keep in contact with them.

Environmental issues like the drought and heat are always going to be a big deal with overall quality of a product, but I think communication and the ability to be nimble is important. A year or two ago, we had an issue with our broccoli crop, so we just pivoted and did something else. We still want to be providing the most visually appealing products that we can to our students so I have to make that call on a case-by-case basis.

Are there any plans to expand the local sourcing initiative?

We’re still going to continue creating really robust salad bars for all of our students, but we’re shifting to the entire school meal. We’re working with producers in California to bring some chicken products to our students and cooking from scratch in our kitchen. We have combi ovens that we’re putting in our kitchens, so we’re going to be increasing the amount of scratch cooking that we’re doing. So that’s going to expand to all of our schools, hopefully.

What advice do you have for other school districts that want to incorporate more local produce into their meals?

If they are just getting started, usually they can start with the lowest hanging fruit, which is hand-held fruit. So start small and feature it maybe one time a month and then build some [education] around it to help students understand that this is a special item and something that you are trying to do on a regular basis.