School district partnership benefits local farmers

This is part of Food Management's new Community program, which highlights the ways onsite operators are lending a helping hand in their communities.

Undoubtedly the most high-profile role onsite dining units have undertaken in building relations with surrounding communities has been the proliferation of supplier relationships with farmers, ranchers and vendors in their localities. There is hardly an onsite dining segment that has not taken aggressive steps to do more local purchasing, even in regions with fairly limited agricultural activity.

One of the most recent entrants to this field is the Madison County Schools in Kentucky, where Scott Anderson, director of foodservices, has forged “extreme” relationships with two area farmers and more modest ties with three others to supply the district kitchens with fresh produce. In addition, there is also a supplier relationship with a local packer of sausage products.

A kitchen staffer prepares spaghetti squash for use in the school lunch program, an example of an out-of-the-ordinary crop the program is introducing students to. (Photo: Scott Anderson/Madison County Schools)

Madison County’s local sourcing program kicked off with the district’s summer feeding program this year and is in full swing with the start of the 2017-2018 school year. Also, because summer is the height of the growing season when crops are freshest, Anderson took the opportunity to process some of the bounty into components for meals in the fall such as salsa.

Thanks to the new relationship with the school district, the farmers are also now planting later into the season than they would normally so that the crops can come ripe at different times into the deep fall, providing the freshest possible produce while extending the farmers’ productivity.

The ties don’t stop at the edge of the growing fields or at the loading dock but extend into the classroom as in addition to making weekly deliveries of just-picked goods to the district, the farmers engage the students to teach them about the food chains.

“We bring [the farmers] in every few weeks and they talk to the kids and bring new produce out that the kids may not have seen,” Anderson explains. “They do tastings and show them how it grows and things like that.”

The idea to engage area farmers started with an innocent query from a student about a new vegetable being served that day in the cafeteria.

“He asked, ‘How did you turn the broccoli white?’” Anderson recalls. “That made us think that we really were not exposing them to enough vegetables. So the idea was, how can we show them how these veggies grow?”

That led to another issue, he adds: “How can we support local farmers?”

Crops now being sourced locally include zucchini, spaghetti and summer squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, broccoli, watermelon and cantaloupe.

“We met with [the farmers] in early December and told them we would need the basic veggies but wanted them to experiment with different types that would be new and different and that the kids never had,” Anderson recalls. He cites the spaghetti squash as an example of an item the kids are probably unfamiliar with, and is planning other such relative exotics as okra for down the line.

At the same time, Anderson remains cognizant of the factors the farmers must face.

“We know the farmers have to buy the seeds, prepare the land and do other things, and some of this is new for them,” he offers. “So we asked them to experiment some this year and [told them] whatever they grew we would purchase and figure out how to use.”

There are also, of course, benefits for the farmers in working with a relatively large-volume purchaser. Madison County operates 18 school sites and has an enrollment of more than 10,000 students.

The two farms with which Anderson works most closely have both “drastically” increased the size of their farms, he notes, while the sausage supplier has added several more workers and increased the size of its hog herd.