St. Paul steps up Farm-to-School initiative
By Mike Mitchelson

Out of the 50 states, only six (North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and West Virginia) don’t have a local Farm-to-School program, the initiative that aims to bring more locally- and sustainably-produced foods to school cafeterias. More than 2,000 school districts across the country are involved. With those participatory numbers and nutrition guidelines at the forefront of the school lunch debate, it’s safe to declare that finding locally-grown products is no mere feel-good measure.

The Minnesota program has infiltrated the Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts and beyond. Winona schools and its foodservice director, Annette Derouin, have taken a leadership role by featuring a monthly, locally-grown dish throughout the school year. Other districts have been recognized for their Farm to School initiatives, including Little Falls, which received a Congressional Hunger Award last year.

Further, the MSNA partnered with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy to launch a task force to develop a blueprint to expand local food use in Minnesota schools.

Also in partnership with the IATP is St. Paul Pubic Schools. The district received a Kellogg Foundation grant to participate in the School Food FOCUS Project, which is a network of large urban school districts working to include locally and sustainably-produced foods in their lunch programs.

Jim Groskopf, St. Paul Public Schools purchasing analyst, attended recently the annual Farm to Cafeteria conference in Portland (co-sponsored by the National Farm to School Program), where much of the discussion was logistics. St. Paul, Groskopf said, with the grant is looking at “procurement practices for large urban school districts.”

To that end, the district is writing a Request for Proposal for fall produce. “(It’s) more of a contract approach, letting the growers know what we want now, so they can plant accordingly,” he said. “And part of what we’re looking for is to really make sure everything is transparent, so everyone up and down the food chain is being treated fairly from the grower to the processor to the customer.”

Restaurant owners and chefs who build their menus with a local and sustainable philosophy often spend much time on the phone procuring the goods from individual producers, and larger-scale operations often run into supply and distribution issues. Those challenges present themselves to school districts, but there’s another unique to them: most districts—including St. Paul—lack any significant processing ability. “We need all of our produce delivered to us in final form: chopped, diced, sliced, etc.,” Groskopf said.

St. Paul Schools’ central commissary is, essentially, a distribution center for the district’s 60-plus schools, where the meals are then prepared. “Our challenge is to find local produce processors that are willing to work with sourcing local product, and then getting the final product to us.”

With the sourcing left to the processor, that’s one difficulty lifted from the district, but there are still logistics and traceability issues. “We want to know who the grower is as part of the verification process and part of the marketing piece, too,” Groskopf said. “Our goal for fall is to have pictures of the product being grown and a little blurb about the farm it’s grown at.”

Groskopf and other district representatives met recently with farmers and processors, and it’s likely a producer can meet the volume demands. “Talking to one of the growers a couple weeks ago, our volume, in some respects, isn’t that big,” he said. “We think it’s large, but in (the farmer’s) scheme, he didn’t think the volume would be a problem at all.”

The challenge will be what products are available while school is in session—the September start date limits the amount of time schools have to feature products. Groskopf said St. Paul is starting simply, asking for products such as apples, squash, sweet corn, carrots, watermelon, red potatoes, zucchini and cucumbers. “But, really, the second, third week of September, it’s done, especially if there’s an early hard frost.”

With school districts constantly feeling their budgets squeezed, the expense of using locally-grown product rather than USDA commodity isn’t an issue, Groskopf said. “Everyone has their own opinion about that, but I think for the most part it pretty much balances out when you look at the cost of a meal and how you do your overall menu planning,” he said. “Sure, if you’re using roasted red potatoes as opposed to commodity donated tater tots, there’s definitely additional costs involved, but we can make the numbers work.” —Mike Mitchelson



Other Farm-to-School programs

Oregon has been extremely active, Groskopf said, but Illinois is also doing some interesting things to attempt to work with a limited growing season. “Chicago public schools is working with a processor doing local and regionally grown vegetables and fresh frozen processing, so they have a supply year ‘round,” he said. “Different districts have different capacities, and that’s something that Chicago can do just because of their size.”