Farm to school in the news

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Preschool teacher honored in Virginia

Today is Farming in the City Day in Harrisonburg, Virginia, an annual celebration started by preschool teacher Lauren Arbogast (pictured above), who also has the honor of being this year's Agriculture in the Classroom Teacher of the Year in Virginia.

Arbogast teaches preschool at W. H. Keister Elementary School in Harrisonburg and integrates agriculture into not only her own classroom but also the entire school. [….] She and her husband, Brian, and their two sons, Brandon and Jackson, live on a multi-generational farm where they produce beef, poultry and crops. She blogs about her life on the farm at paintthetownag.com.

-- From the Virginia Farm Bureau


USDA pilots new farm to school programs

On Civil Eats, National Farm to School Network policy director Helen Dombalis weighed in on how the new Farm Bill supports farm to school through a new pilot program:

Starting next school year, these programs would provide local fruit and vegetables for at least five, and up to eight, pilot schools across the country, with at least one state in each of the five main regions of the country (the Northeast, the Pacific Northwest, the South, the West, and the Midwest). (The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is expected to release a Request for Proposals (RFP) in the coming months.)

Along with school gardens and food systems education, the National Farm to School Network’s (NFSN) Policy and Strategic Partnerships Director Helen Dombalis says “local procurement is the third key piece of farm-to-school.” NFSN advocated for the pilots along with National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) and Dombalis sees them as an important start.

Read the full post on Civil Eats

Profile: Miguel Villarreal, Novato Unified School District

Tuesday, February 2, 2021


Editor's note: This week we are profiling a few of the wonderful people we met at the 7th National Farm to Cafeteria Conference in Austin last week. More than 1,100 farm to cafeteria movers and shakers gathered for four days of inspiring field trips, workshops, keynotes and more. we are excited to share their stories.


Working for pint-size athletes

At 5 years old, Miguel Villarreal hated beets. He was born into a family of migrant farm workers, and his disdain for the vegetable stemmed from hoeing them.

Education was serious business in Miguel’s family. Though his mom stopped going to school after the 6th grade, she told all of her kids: “you are going to college.” They studied hard during the school year, but in the summers they were all back in the fields. They learned what hard work was, and from a young age, Miguel knew he did not want to work in the fields any longer than he had to.

After graduating from high school, Miguel did go to college where he studied to be a nutritionist. He wanted to work with professional athletes, but when he saw a job posting for a school nutritionist, he thought he’d apply. He got the job and has been in that field ever since. Miguel quips that while he did not did not follow his passion of being a nutritionist for professional athletes, he works for pint-size athletes instead.

Miguel’s career began in a Dallas school where the schedule left him enough free time in the evening to earn a masters degree. But he really liked the work he was doing, so he started applying for food service director positions. He was thrilled to find a job in Victoria, Texas where he would serve 12,000 kids.  After three years, he moved to Plano, Texas and served 20,000 kids. During the six years he was there, the district ballooned to 45,000 kids.

Miguel’s heart and passion have always been in nutrition, but his 20-year career in Texas left him unfulfilled.

“I was focused on managing the bottom line and not the students’ waist lines,” he says.  “We were being asked to generate revenue by super sizing, selling soda and any junk food the kids would buy to bring in money.”

He'd had enough and quit.

Miguel moved to California and got a job selling software to schools. That company had to downsize during the recession, and he found himself unemployed. He eventually found a new job as school food manager for Novato School District in California. At first, he was less than enthused about his new position. “I was in a smaller office, in a smaller district and I said ‘man, I’m moving backwards.’ But after having a pity party for a couple days, I chose to accept my new reality,” he says.  


Ready for change in California

Miguel looked around and saw he was in Marin county. He saw that there were a lot of farmers and that people generally really cared about their health and that they were active ... or so he thought. He happened to attend a meeting at which the Health and Human Services Department of Marin County presented the statistics on childhood obesity. What he learned was that 35 percent of students in his district were overweight. “I heard her say it, and I saw it in the graph, and it blew my whole image of California,” he says. “We've got a problem.”  

Back at the office, Miguel looked at the menu and went line by line to examine what they were selling. The first thing he saw that didn't make any sense was soda. So he got rid of soda.

Getting rid of soda also meant getting rid of a $70,000 annual revenue stream for the district. He told his business manager that he would find a way to make up the difference. At the time, only 200 of 1,600 potential free-or-reduced lunch students were eating breakfast. Since the government pays for each meal eaten by students who qualify for the program, increasing the number of students eating breakfast at school would serve a dual purpose: It would help to make sure they got a good, nutritious breakfast, and it would generate new revenue.

Miguel’s strategy was to make breakfast part of the school day. He persuaded the administration to create a nutrition break after the first class ended around 9 a.m. They went from 200 to 1,200 students eating breakfast each day, creating more than $70,000 in new revenue and, more importantly, providing 1,000 more kids with a good breakfast. Soda was out, and breakfast was in.


Time to learn more and find partners

After this success, Miguel decided that to take on other parts of the problem. He quickly realized that he needed to get out in the community and meet the other people who were involved in the system he was trying to change. He attended meetings, found books to read and became a sponge for information. As his understanding expanded, he felt he had an obligation and a responsibility to do something. Maya Angelou says "you do your best until you know better, and when you know better you do better." It became a personal mantra.

Miguel also knew he couldn't do it alone. He spent 2003 and 2004 networking and finding coalitions. That led him to Marin Organic, a non-profit organization near his school district. The executive director at the time was Helga Hellberg. He taught Miguel that 20 percent of crops were being tilled under because of blemishes that would have made them unsalable in the market. At the same time Helga was looking for a way to use this extra produce, Miguel was looking for a way to buy food from local farms. It was a serendipitous match.  

They started a gleaning program. Once the perfect-looking produce had been harvested, students and their families would go through the fields for a second round of harvest to gather food that was perfect in every way except appearance. They established a distribution system that allowed food to be gleaned on Monday, delivered to schools on Tuesday and served on Wednesday. The program is still running today, but the deliveries are now sent to local food banks.

Miguel estimates that in his 20 years in Texas, he had met five teachers. Through a large number of lunch meetings (with food provided), he met every single teacher in the Novato district - all 400 of them - in his first few years in Marin County. As his coalitions grew, five different universities began to send interns to help out and learn what was going on.


From food service director to wellness director

Miguel is now focused on transforming the role of a food service director into that of wellness director. He and his colleagues in other school districts influence so many areas of school and education – indeed, food service is about much more than food.

It was in Food Justice, a book co-authored by Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi (executive director and co-founder of NFSN), that Miguel first learned about the 3 C’s of farm to school: cafeteria, classroom and community. The idea grew on Miguel, and now he uses it to explain what he does at work every day. Miguel’s concern for the environment, the health of his students, California’s water crisis and the overall carbon footprint of his operation are the things that drive him on. The less processed foods are and the more plant-based his meals are, the better they tend to be in each of his areas of concern.

This year, the superintendent and the community have asked Miguel to do what he has done in Novato for the rest of the schools in the county. That means 18 school districts are about to collaborate to recast the food service director as the wellness director.

Miguel emphasizes that none of this is the result of the efforts of one person, but he asserts that it only takes one person to get started. Miguel believes that there needs to be someone doing this work in every community in America.

For people seeking to make changes in their school district, Miguel offers this advice: “Break the huge tasks down into smaller, manageable programs. Take this thing we call school lunch, and ask, ‘what one thing can I do today?’  Start. Even if it is at just one school. But do it well. Celebrate the success and do the next thing tomorrow.”


Profile: Emily Ling, Texas Jail Project

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Editor's note: This week we are profiling a few of the wonderful people we met at the 7th National Farm to Cafeteria Conference in Austin last week. More than 1,100 farm to cafeteria movers and shakers gathered for four days of inspiring field trips, workshops, keynotes and more. we are excited to share their stories.

Emily Ling grew up in a small town near Waco, Texas called Lorena, where her grandmother's garden was one of her first encounters with the power of food. She received her undergraduate degree from Baylor, then spent her 20s working with a variety of nonprofits and completing a masters at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. In her studies and early nonprofit work, Emily focused on juvenile justice and criminal justice reform. Working at the ACLU, she became passionate about mass incarceration and thought she would spend her life working on those issues, but the longer Emily lived in Austin the more she became interested in the local food movement and the justice issues involved with healthy eating.

After graduating in 2012, she went to live and work on the Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia.  The Farm’s name is Greek for "community," and it was started by a pastor in 1942 who wanted to create a place where blacks and whites could live and work together as equals. Getting healthy food to people who need it kept coming up in all of the issues she cared about where she had never seen the importance of food before.

As a place that practiced hospitality, Koinonia welcomed a variety of visitors -- retired couples from other countries, businessmen from big cities, kids from the rural community, even families of immigrants whose loved ones were held at a nearby immigration detention center. As people of all races, classes and cultures ate meals together, Emily noticed how sitting around a table levels the playing field. We all need food.

She came to believe that if we all shared meals with people we don’t necessarily understand, it might go a long way toward helping us accept each other.

Emily returned to Austin in September of 2013 and tried to figure out how all of her interests fit together. First, she started working with Green Gate Farms and fell in love with it.  

“You were working hard but you were also laughing constantly – oh and there were some pretty adorable piglets," she says.

After volunteering with Green Gate Farms for several months, Emily started volunteering with the Texas Jail Project as well, and in March she was hired as their project coordinator. The Texas Jail Project is a small non-profit that advocates for the nearly 67,000 people in county jail across Texas.  She works to collect the stories of people locked up there and how their experience in jail impacts not only their lives, but their families and communities.

While prisons make all the headlines and get all of what little attention people pay to this issue, county jails are like the emergency room for the criminal justice system. They are often full of poor people who cannot make bail and so stay locked up for weeks or months while they await trial. On average 50-60 percent of people in jail are people who have not been convicted of anything. For many, charges will be dropped or they will be acquitted by a jury of their peers, but until then, they sit in jail.

There are two major issues Emily wants to change:

First: The quality of food is often horrible in jails. In Texas, jail food only has to be "approved by a dietitian," but there are no policies that ensure that the food contains enough nutrients. Most people stuck in jail are poor, and they disproportionally have medical conditions that are exacerbated by an unhealthy diet. Emily suspects this has a huge impact on the cost of healthcare that must be provided to inmates, and she also believes there are links between diet and mental health.  

“For people that have been through struggles and trauma, eating poor quality food adds further harm to bodies that are likely already struggling physically and mentally," she says.

Second: Emily is interested in the potential to have more gardens and farms in prisons as therapeutic programming. It is also good skills training, and sustainable agriculture may be a great industry for ex-felons to find work upon their release.

In Texas and the rest of the South, prison labor replaced slave labor for much of the agricultural industry, creating a difficult cultural history around agriculture in prison systems. Many families of color held not working in the fields as a source of pride and evidence of progress, so when talking about the "opportunity" of prison farms, one has to overcome that legacy.  It isn’t going to be easy.

Emily’s faith motivates both the food and the criminal justice work she is engaged in. "Christians are called to be good steward of the land, and we are not doing a good job of that,” she says. As for her prison work, “None of us are beyond redemption," Emily says. "Moses and David and Paul were all murderers. But the worst thing they ever did wasn’t the end of the story. It was upon receiving grace that they did their greatest good.”

She argues that we cannot just throw away people in jails and prisons. Unless people have a life sentence, they are coming back to our communities. Prisons have to be about rehabilitation, not just punishment.

She says it takes more care and investment to understand what people have been through and help them rejoin society. It is harder, but that is the work she’s called to

USDA accepting comments for local school wellness policies

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Once a bill is passed and signed into law, the next step in the policy process is implementation of the new law. There is an opportunity right now for you to shape the implementation of a policy that will impact the farm to school community! USDA is accepting comments through April 28, 2014 on its proposed rule for local school wellness policies.

A few years ago, Congress passed and President Obama signed into law the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 (or HHFKA for short). Section 204 of HHFKA updates guidelines for local school wellness policies, which are required of schools receiving federal funds for school meal programs. The proposed rule simply means that USDA is proposing how it will implement the new law and is seeking public comments before the rule is finalized. Are you going to tell USDA what you think? If you’ve never submitted comments before, we are here to help!


your new source for farm to school policy news

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Helen Dombalis, NFSN's policy and strategic partnerships director, offers a policy update at NFSN's 2013 annual meeting. Helen will be writing policy blog posts on a regular basis.

With the launch of the National Farm to School’s Network new website comes an exciting new feature: our blog! Along with serving as a resource and networking hub for all aspects of farm to school, NFSN also serves as a policy advocate for the farm to school movement. Thus, our new blog will feature updates and

information on what’s happening in Washington, DC and around the country. Check back regularly to learn about key opportunities to influence policies that impact you. If you’re involved in farm to school advocacy in your state or community, please share your farm to school story with us.

In 2010, the National Farm to School Network and partner organizations advocated for federal funding for the USDA Farm to School Grant Program that now provides $5 million annually to support farm to school activities. This program is one of many examples of successful advocacy now benefitting the farm to school community. USDA is currently accepting applications for the program. The deadline to apply for a USDA Farm to School Grant is April 30, 2014.