Staff Project Update

Davis Farm to School Connection

By Gail Feenstra, Chris Lewis and Lyra Halprin, SAREP; Ann Evans, California Department of Education; Renata Brillinger and Dorothy Peterson, Davis Joint Unified School District; Cynthia Havstad and Lynn Wheeler, Food Waste Diversion Project; and Kerri Stevens and Jeri Ohmart, Community Alliance with Family Farmers

In February 2000, a coalition of parent leaders working with education, nutrition, and environmental professionals from local nonprofits, the University of California, and the California Department of Education, formed the Davis Farm to School Connection. Their vision:

To educate and nourish students through a farm and garden-based experience that embraces the connections between agriculture, environment, nutrition, health and community; to celebrate the cycles and seasons of life by growing, preparing and eating fresh food, and to integrate these principles into the curriculum and lunchroom.

To realize this vision, the Davis Farm to School Connection raised money under the auspices of the Davis Educational Foundation, a 10-year-old 501 (c) 3 nonprofit organization, to support the following goals:

• Develop pilot “Farmers Market Salad Bars” as a method to add value to the District’s existing Nutrition Services program. The salad bars offers seasonal fruits, nuts and vegetables purchased from local farms that practice environmentally sound agriculture, as well other agricultural commodities. It provides students with more choices to meet their nutritional needs.
  
  
• Reinforce lessons learned from eating local, seasonal produce by offering visits to local farms and farmers markets.
  
  
• Maintain and expand existing school gardens, and integrate environmental and nutrition concepts from the garden, farm and lunchroom experiences into the curriculum.
  
  
• Incorporate waste from the salad bar and garden into an on-site recycling and composting program to reduce overall waste.
  
  
• Develop a culinary and cooking component that enhances nutrition education.

In pursuing these objectives, the Davis Farm to School Connection joined a growing movement across the nation that recognizes the importance of nutrition to learning, and focuses on innovative approaches to education that connect students to agriculture and the natural world. Some school districts in California, most notably in Santa Monica and Berkeley, are pioneering the linking of school gardens, culinary arts, school food service, recycling and local sustainable agriculture to the educational process and state standards.

FIRST YEAR PROGRESS

In addition to identifying the milestones reached during this first year, the information presented here provides preliminary data aimed at improving the effectiveness and sustainability of the Davis Farm to School Connection. Because this project is only in its infancy, and because many of the activities have only been implemented in their most nascent pilot phases, the authors strongly caution against using any of the data to make more than qualitative predictions about future impacts and costs of this program.

Pioneer Elementary “Crunch Lunch” Salad Bar Pilot Project

“Crunch Lunch” participants enjoy using a variety of dressings on their fresh vegetables. (photo by Lyra Halprin)

The “Crunch Lunch” salad bar offers a nutritionally complete meal alternative to the regular hot lunch. Sustainably grown (primarily organic) ingredients for the salad bar are purchased from local growers in season. A salad bar coordinator organizes the salad bar purchases from growers and oversees their delivery, preparation, mealtime set-up, and clean up at the school site. The Pioneer Crunch Lunch Salad Bar pilot program opened in mid-March 2001, offering the alternative salad bar on a daily basis to school children until the end of the school year.

Impacts on small farm profitability

Total gross sales to farmers during the first three months of the pilot project totaled $4,261. Eight primary suppliers provided 85 percent of the produce used in the salad bar. Each of the primary suppliers made sales of between $20 and $80 per week on average. Eighty percent (by dollar value) of the produce purchased came from organic growers. Interviews with three of the most consistent suppliers to the pilot project revealed that the growers were very satisfied with the pilot project so far, and look forward to its growth.

School nutrition services viability

Preliminary cost analysis of the 57 days of salad bar operation showed that total food costs (including local produce, protein, breads, milk and supplies) for the salad bar averaged 83 cents per meal. It is anticipated that this cost will decrease as a higher volume of produce is purchased due to the addition of schools. Due to the start-up nature of the pilot project, projected labor costs are not yet available. It should be noted that all of the labor costs for the period of the pilot phase of the project are paid for by grants.

School children’s preferences, participation

Students generally like the salad bar and were excited when it was introduced. Although participation dropped off from initial levels of up to 295 students daily in the first two weeks to an average of 179 during April and May, the salad bar consistently increased participation in the school lunch program by 25 percent over the average attendance during the two weeks prior to its introduction. Adult participation rose from zero before the Crunch Lunch option was introduced to 41 in April and 42 in May (about two to three adults per day). Seasonality, selection and presentation appear to significantly affect participation, as do other quality control issues including ripeness and cosmetic pest damage. Further evaluation will include more in-depth analysis based on interviews and focus group results from the next year. The addition of a second pilot project at another school will provide more statistically valid and significant data.

Parents, other community member participation

Many parent volunteers participated in the program from its inception. In addition to financial and in-kind support from the Pioneer PTA as well as other parent and teacher volunteers, a number of community organizations have been instrumental in the Crunch Lunch’s early success. Among them is the leadership of the Davis Farmers Market manager, who has been part of the Farm to School Steering Committee. Teachers and administrators have been instrumental in the implementation of this program, and have cooperated in blazing a trail for future participants. Parents, students and staff at other elementary schools in Davis are looking forward to seeing salad bars in their schools as the project progresses.

Future Directions

It is anticipated that two more elementary schools will be able to open Crunch Lunch Salad Bars during the 2001/2002 school year. Issues that will require attention as the salad bar scales up include: more efficient delivery systems for getting foods from farmers to the schools; additional kitchen and cold storage space needed to prepare and store produce for the salad bar; and union and contract hiring requirements that affect various staff.

School Gardens

Students in the Pioneer Elementary School garden check the ripening strawberries, which are used in school lunches when available. Most food is purchased from local farmers who sell at the Davis Farmers Market. (photo by Lyra Halprin)

Three pilot elementary schools have been the focus of this study: Pioneer, César Chávez and Birch Lane. The district garden coordinator has kept site team leaders at each school appraised of grant criteria for their school gardens and created a regional network to enhance opportunities to partner with local, county and state public agencies as well as private businesses. Through this network, the garden coordinator locates resource information and materials to distribute to the school garden team leaders. So far, each school has received free plants every four to five weeks from two local businesses. Team leaders from each school also attend planning meetings twice a year to maintain ongoing communication and receive gardening and nutritional information updates as they come into the district from both public and private agencies. The garden coordinator also has also sought to identify grants applicable to the overall strategies of the garden and nutrition programs in the district.

In the summer and fall of 2001, the garden coordinator will focus on establishing a district garden policy draft and action plan for the growth of school gardens over the next three years. Team meetings with representatives from each of the district’s 14 schools will continue to provide opportunities for all participants to contribute to the development of the policy and action plan. These meetings will also keep them informed of progress on the Crunch Lunch Farmers Market Salad Bar, and the application of garden-based education toward meeting state education requirements. One of the activities planned for next year in partnership with the Davis Food Coop will be cooking demonstrations and culinary lessons for students at local junior and senior high schools.

Networking and partnerships will continue to play a key role in connecting the school district administration and school board to agencies and individuals who will help support and enrich a garden-based curriculum that improves the overall educational experience for students.

Composting and Waste Reduction

The school district piloted food waste composting systems at Birch Lane, César Chávez and Pioneer elementary schools during the 2000-2001 school year. The goal of the Food Waste Diversion Project is to develop and test site-specific systems to reduce the lunch waste stream, particularly the food components, while engaging students in the ongoing practice of composting and recycling. Project goals are to integrate composting into the school garden program as part of a larger farm to school vision; train teachers to include composting in the curricula and thus provide students with hands-on learning activities; model the practice of reduce, reuse, recycle and rot; educate the community; and create a sustainable program.

The school district is uniquely poised to model the way a medium-sized district conceptualizes and implements a lunch food waste diversion program in a suburban county. The district’s Food Waste Diversion Project includes vermicomposting (using worms), composting, food rescue efforts and a switch to an “offer vs. serve” food service plan. At all schools in Davis, including the three sites for this project, the district’s nutrition service director has implemented a lunch program that offers students a choice of entrées and fruits or vegetables. Providing students with a choice at lunch can reduce the waste stream. Also at all three project sites, the organic waste generated from student lunches and school gardens are composted or vermicomposted. The methods of composting include a mid-scale composting system with an enzyme pretreatment, mid-scale composting and vermicomposting systems without pretreatment, and a classroom-scale vermicomposting system. Rescue of edible, unopened food was included in the project at César Chávez and Pioneer elementary schools. To further reduce the lunch waste stream, molded fiber trays replaced the polystyrene (“foam”) trays previously used for hot lunches at César Chávez and Pioneer.

Establishing a team of teachers, parents and students lead by a salaried site coordinator was the first step in implementing the program at each school site. All site coordinators worked with the Composting and Waste Reduction Project’s manager and assistant manager to audit the lunch waste stream at their sites and create work plans based on that waste stream. The project included audits and a planning phase in order to design systems that were appropriate to the needs and resources of the school and to ensure school site “buy-in.” Additional factors in the success of the project were training of staff, teachers and students throughout the project; integrating composting into the curricula; assessment of the results; and outreach to the community.

Farm-based Nutrition, Culinary Education

Students choose food from sections marked “Protein,” “Vegetables” and “Fruits” at the salad bar. Observers guide the children if they’re not getting a balanced lunch. (photo by Lyra Halprin)

A team of teachers and garden coordinators from the three pilot schools have developed an outline for enhancing existing nutrition curricula in their schools with links to the gardens, the salad bar, and cooking lessons. The plan is in its early stages of development, and will be initiated in the 2001-02 school year. Resources will be primarily focused at the Grade Two level where the statewide standards include components on understanding where food comes from and the role of agriculture. The teacher teams will be evaluating published garden and nutrition curricula with the intention of incorporating new elements into the resources of their school.

Grade Two students in the pilot schools will have an opportunity to visit a farm and take part in activities with real farmers, beginning in the spring of 2002. Community Alliance with Family Farmers organizes the visits; many will be hosted by the same farmers supplying produce to the Crunch Lunch salad bars. A pre-trip classroom activity will prepare the students for the visit. The farm visit itself will address a key question outlined in California’s statewide educational standards, “What role does a farmer play in food production?” A post-trip discussion will solicit students’ reactions, and possibly include a visit with the farmer in the school setting where students can connect what they saw and did on the farm to their everyday activities. Preliminary efforts to identify local farmers interested in hosting field trips have been encouraging, and outreach and planning will continue during the summer and fall.

Grade Two teachers will also have access to garden-based training offered by the UC Children’s Garden; the training will teach teachers how to conduct participatory cooking activities using produce from the school garden. Schoolwide activities involving local farmers are also being planned. Funding is available for purchasing cooking carts for use in pilot school gardens and classrooms. The California Department of Education Nutrition Services Division funds all of these components.

FUNDING SOURCES

The following federal, state, and local agencies, organizations and individuals have contributed funding to the Davis Farm To School Connection: USDA/Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems, California Department of Education, California Integrated Waste Management Board, University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, Pioneer Elementary School PTA, Rotary Club of Davis, Davis Farmers Market Board of Directors, Venture Club of Davis, Soroptimist International of Davis, Twin Pines Cooperative Foundation, Women’s Social and Cultural League, and an anonymous donor.