Local Food for Schools Program a win-win for public schools and local farmers

      Tommy Hexter, director of Grinnell Farm to Table, and Kim Sieck, school nutrition director at Grinnell, coordinates a delivery of 80 pounds of breakfast sausage from Compass Plant CSA as part of the USDA local food for schools program. The program brings food raised by local farmers to area schools. In Poweshiek County, Grinnell and Montezuma utilize the program.

​        The USDA LFS (Local Food for Schools) program provides schools across the nation with grants to purchase food from local farms. New reports on the Iowa Local Food for Schools program (LFS) highlights the value that providing funding to school cafeterias to purchase from local farmers brings to the state. In November 2023, a report was released that displayed that 110 farmers participated in the program, providing food to 135 school districts at a value over $279,000 in total. Based on a calculation in the report, for every dollar spent on the program, $1.94 returned as economic impact for the community in the form of job impact and value for local farmers recirculating the income in their economy. 
          In January 2024, the LFS grant team sent out a survey to participating school food service directors to ask them about their experiences with the program and how it impacts child nutrition. When asked, “What would you tell your elected officials about the importance of this program to your school?” 80 of the 120 participating schools statewide responded to the question about how much this program has added to their school breakfast and lunch programs. In Poweshiek County, Grinnell-Newburg Community School District and Montezuma Community School District have partnered with Grinnell Farm To Table to access a combined $20,000 of food from local farmers during 2023. These products included local eggs, pork sausage, beef, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, yogurt, and more from farms including Compass Plant CSA in Grinnell and Pleasant Grove Homestead in Montezuma. 
         Kim Sieck, school nutrition director of the Grinnell-Newburg School District commented, “This program helped us bring in items that we normally do not have the option of purchasing, exposing the students to a wider variety of healthy foods.”
       Angie Radeke, school nutrition director for Montezuma schools responded simply, “Better quality food, the kids enjoyed having farm fresh."
​        Tommy Hexter, Executive Director of Grinnell Farm To Table talked about the impact he sees in investing in local food for schools, noting “public money has always been used to purchase food for school meals. It only makes sense to use those funds to purchase from local farmers to positively impact the local economy and provide higher quality fresh food.”
           Since the start of LFS in 2022, schools have purchased over $1.8 million in locally produced food from 167 local producers, with schools in 69 counties that received funds from the program in the 2022-23 school year. These data and comments in the reports are a bright spot in Iowa’s food and farm system and showcase how Iowans value their children and farmers. The USDA program expired in March 2024, and many advocates around the state are hoping that the Iowa legislature will allocate money toward a “farm-to-school fund” to continue the program. More information about the state Local Food for Schools program can be found at https://www.iowafarmtoschoolearlycare.org/ifs.