Why are 64 percent of schools not serving local food?

WASHINGTON — For many years, if a public school district wanted to serve students apples or milk from local farmers, it could face all kinds of hurdles. Schools were locked into strict contracts with distributors, few of whom saw any reason to start bringing in local products. Those contracts also often precluded schools from working directly with local farmers.

But buying local got easier with federal legislation in 2008, and then again in 2010, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture created the Farm to School program to get more healthful food in schools and link smaller U.S. farmers with a steady market of lunch rooms.

A new survey of schools and their local food purchases offers a bit of a progress report on the program. During the 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years, the survey found, 36 percent of U.S. school lunchrooms were feeding kids food from local producers: things like carrots and peaches, all from nearby farms.

Surprisingly, school districts in Big Ag states like California or Washington weren't serving the most local food for lunch. That distinction belongs to handful of schools in the northeast—Maine, Vermont, Maryland and Delaware.

Why them? Some of those states have focused heavily on building local food economies, and their small size, arguably, has made it easier for local food to gain market share.

Even schools that go local, though, aren't serving up plates likely to pass a locavore test. On average, only about 13 percent of the food budgets at schools serving local food actually went to stuff that was grown nearby.

Still, "interest in local foods is pretty high," says Katherine Ralston, an agricultural economist at USDA. And the amount of local food served "was higher than we expected."

So what happened with the other 64 percent of schools who weren't serving local food?

While 9 percent of all schools said they plan to incorporate local food at lunch soon, fully half simply don't do so at all: 38 percent neither serve nor teach about local food, and another 12 percent don't serve local food but do take part in other local food efforts, like school gardens. (The last 6 percent of schools, curiously, reported they didn't know whether they use local food or not.)

And the reasons why, says, Ralston, are surprising.

"It's not a supply problem," says Ralston. Indeed, more than three-quarters of schools serving local food got it through a regular distribution channel—think Sysco—instead of having to contract directly with individual producers.