An earlier Farm2Fork article pointed out that "buy local" has become an integral component in our schools' child nutrition programs. Kanawha, and neighboring Putnam County, each have dynamic and resourceful Food Service Directors, Diane Miller and Stella Young, respectively, who have done a masterful job of finding local farm products for their districts' programs.
Mason County, just a little farther away, also has a strong farm-to-school program. Its system has 10 schools. Beverly Glaze, as the current food service director for the county, is in charge of providing nutritious breakfasts and lunches for the approximately 4,200 students who attend those schools - a responsibility she carries out most effectively.
Like other progressive child nutrition programs in the state, Glaze's school's salad bars serve locally grown red, yellow and green peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, various lettuces, along with cantaloupe and watermelon. Similarly, her lunch menu sometimes features green beans raised by a farmer just a few miles from the school.
Her constant outreach to producers has also netted the program 40 dozen farm-fresh eggs each week. That number, which seems large to a layman, is actually only enough for one or two schools.
What is different about the Mason County farm-to-school initiative, however, is that, at the present time, the district's cold storage unit houses 170 50-pound bags of potatoes raised by eight local farmers. The potatoes were washed and sized in the West Virginia Department of Agriculture's facility in neighboring Cabell County to ensure students have home-grown potatoes throughout the school year.
In addition, the district purchased 51 hogs for this school year and had a local in-county company, K & L Processing, process them into pork loins and breakfast sausage patties. Last school year, the program bought six steers that were processed into ground beef and stew meat for students' lunches, along with 21 hogs.
Mason County is, and for the last five years has been, a role model for farm-to-school that is unique in the state because the leadership and innovation for this program comes not just from an excellent and innovative food service director, but from an energized broad coalition that includes, quite unusually, the school board itself, along with the school superintendent, the food service director and the West Virginia University County Extension Agent.
Rodney Wallbrown, now retired from his Mason County WVU Extension position, has nonetheless continued his efforts with farm-to-school, working part-time with the West Virginia Department of Agriculture.
Wallbrown remembers that approximately five years ago, he approached the then-Food Service Director Christi Rulen about his interest in enlisting local farmers open to new ideas for selling produce to the school system.
He recalls her responding enthusiastically: "Thank goodness someone has come to help us," because prior to that she had been trying to source local products from area farmers on her own.
Since those first days, some things have changed - the school board and the district Superintendent Jack Cullen not only endorsed the program, but he embraced and enthusiastically looks for innovative ways to expand it.
Cullen explained that the school board is keenly aware how its county fair (like most fairs) sets a weight range for livestock and animals to be eligible for auction and that these animals then command a premium price.
But the animals that fall outside that weight range are usually consigned to a typical livestock auction where they bring in considerably less. Hogs and steers purchased for use in the child nutrition program were animals from this second "also ran" category.
Instead of having their 4-H and Future Farmers of America students' animals consigned to the auction where they would bring a minimal amount, the district purchased them at a reasonable price, ensuring a quality product for the school nutrition program and a fair return to the student grower.
Cullen, with his and then his children's' experience with 4-H livestock projects, has 40 years of first-hand knowledge of the importance of a reasonable return to youth from the sale of their animals.
"When the district buys these animals, it's a way to help the community, a way to help the kids and a way to ensure the best quality product on the table for our students' lunches," Cullen said.
One of the farmers who grows potatoes for Mason County, Dan Foglesong, was also one of the first producers Wallbrown spoke to five years ago. From early on, Foglesong brought peppers and tomatoes grown in one of his two high tunnels (a less expensive version of a green house) for the salad bar.
A year or two later, when he added two more high tunnels, he added cucumbers, lettuces and watermelons - which the students went wild for. And since his high tunnels stayed in production all winter, he could provide these products throughout the school year, not just the normal growing season.
Foglesong is now ready to add two more tunnels to increase production capacity. Foglesong said farm-to-school has "increased business quite a bit." In addition to produce for the salad bar, four years ago, at Wallbrown's suggestion, he planted 10 acres of pinto and black beans, and when he harvested them, he sold them to 13 different counties' food service programs.
But Dan isn't the only Foglesong who has been bitten by the farm-to-school bug. It's become a joint family effort as first his son, Drew, and then his daughter, Danielle, began to grow their own products for the program. One year, Danielle grew mostly tomatoes, but she switched to growing melons, which turned out to be easier to grow and much easier to pick.
In addition to having her dad as an agricultural coach, her high school FFA teachers, Sam Nibert and Tim Kidwell, also acted as mentors and encouraged her to participate in the program.
Mason County has had an excellent farm-to-school program for years, and Glaze continues planning how to expand and enhance it for the future. She could see large-scale purchases, like 6,000 pounds of pork from 50-plus hogs, might create a storage challenge.
So she submitted a small-equipment grant application to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and received funding for a 10-foot-by-8-foot walk-in freezer to allow for even more large-item purchases.
She also realized that by buying the hogs as the district did, she was able to direct the processor to create a product with less than 30 percent fat, which is in sync with the federal and state guidelines for nutrition.
Glaze also continues to work with individual school food directors to find innovative recipes for pork.
Of course, some of the loins are roasted in a traditional way and served with mashed potatoes and a vegetable, but some are also shredded and served as a pulled-pork barbecue.
And the sausage, in addition to being served at breakfast as patties, is being broken up in sausage gravy, as a topping for sausage pizza or mixed with beef for chili.
Mason County has certainly created an interesting model - thousands upon thousands of dollars paid in as school taxes stay right there as county farmers sell animals for school lunches. The animals are processed in the county, and the farmers use some of their earnings to pay other county residents for feed and other supplies for the animals, recirculating the money one more time.
Resource information for this article was provided by Bekki Leigh, coordinator for Farm to School, West Virginia Department of Education; Keri Kennedy with the Office of Child Nutrition, WVDE; and Buddy Davidson West Virginia Department of Agriculture. Send questions or comments to Allen Arnold at
aarnold@wvfarm2u.org.