NSAC's Blog
Farm to School Grant Awards Announced for 2014
November 19, 2013
In his third communication in as many days on the importance of local and regional food systems and marketing for America’s farmers and rural communities, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the Fiscal Year 2014 awardees of the national Farm to School Grant Program.
USDA awarded $5.2 million in grants to 71 funded projects, located in 42 states plus the District of Columbia, which will serve more than 13,000 schools and 2.8 million students, nearly 45 percent of whom live in rural communities.
Since last year, the Farm to School Grant Program has provided competitive grants to schools, nonprofits, state and local agencies, agricultural producers, and Indian tribal organizations to increase local food procurement for school meal programs and to expand educational activities on agriculture and food. These grants can be used for training, supporting operations, planning, purchasing equipment, developing school gardens, developing partnerships, and implementing farm to school programs.
In 2009, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), in partnership with the National Farm to School Network and other organizations, won a total of $40 million in mandatory funding for the Farm to School Grant Program in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.
NSAC congratulates all the awardees and looks forward to tracking their progress in bringing healthy local food from local farmers into school meal programs. We also applaud USDA’s work on implementing the program.
In particular, we congratulate two NSAC member groups who received awards today:
- The National Center for Appropriate Technology will work with three school districts in central Montana on model farm to school projects that will eventually be transferred to the rest of the state. Collaborators include Montana State Extension, to work with farmers, Montana Team Nutrition, to work with food service professionals, and FoodCorps, to work on nutrition education and garden-based curriculum.
- The Center for Rural Affairs will help develop farm to school programs in eastern Nebraska, working with ten pilot schools and holding two regional farm to school summits as well as training sessions for farmers and school food service personnel.
Other awardees and projects of note include:
- Northeast Iowa Food & Fitness Initiative, which will work with local farmers and a new food hub to scale-up production and aggregation to meet school needs while working with rural schools to increase their local food purchases by 200 percent.
- The Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi, which will work to establish a statewide coordination of farm to school activities – in a state that currently has limited farm to school activity – by providing training and technical assistance, focusing particularly on fruit and vegetable purchases from small and mid-sized Mississippi farmers and training in Good Agricultural Practices/Good Handling Practices certification.
- The Osage Hills Public Schools in Oklahoma, which will work through eleven school districts, in which 71 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced price meals, and the Osage County Interlocal Cooperative, to incorporate healthy foods into school breakfast and lunch programs.
- Kansas Department of Agriculture, which will operate a pilot project in eight school districts on an agriculture education program and a GAP training workshop, with a goal of each school district serving a minimum of two locally produced food items in the school cafeteria per month.
This latest round of USDA Farm to School Grant Program awards is another sign of how popular farm to school activities have become – which was also recently highlighted in the USDA Farm to School Census. USDA received a total of 345 proposals requesting a total of nearly $27 million, of which it was able to award only 71 for a total of $5.2 million. In November 2012, during its inaugural round of awards, the USDA Farm to School Program gave a total of $4.5 million in grants to 68 projects in 37 States and the District of Columbia.
House and Senate conferees currently finalizing a joint version of the new five-year federal farm bill are negotiating the differences between each chamber’s version on issues like farm to school. Specifically, these differences include:
- The House bill, but not the Senate bill, establishing a five-state farm to school pilot program to test procurement from local and statewide farmers within the Department of Defense “Fresh” program that services school districts as well as military commissaries.
- The House bill’s inclusion of a ten school-district pilot program to allow those schools to test and evaluate local and regional procurement as a complement to the national USDA Foods program.
- The House bill, but not the Senate bill, also allowing small rural school districts to opt to buy more of their school foods locally in instances where doing so would result in an administrative cost savings.
NSAC strongly urges the conferees to adopt all three House Farm Bill provisions dealing with farm to school procurement. NSAC also encourages Congress to enhance funding for the Farm to School Grant Program when it takes up the Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill again in 2015.
Categories: Local & Regional Food Systems, Nutrition & Food Access