Students learn about the local food system from seed to plate while helping bring more fresh, local food into Alachua County lunchrooms.
The Alachua County Farm to School to Work Hub Began as a joint venture between the Food and Nutrition Department (FNS) and the Exceptional Student Education Department (ESE) of the Alachua County Public Schools. The GET program (Growing Educational Training) of the ESE department had been teaching students horticultural skills. FNS had recently been awarded a USDA Farm to School grant to ensure more healthy, local fruits and vegetables were served in the school lunch program. Soon a dilapidated greenhouse at Loften High School was being transformed into a vegetable-producing machine, providing 150 heads of lettuce weekly for use in school salads, as well as a number of other vegetables appearing on the weekly menus.
During the first year, the Loften school kitchen became an aggregation facility where produce from local farms was packaged along with the Loften produce for distribution to local schools. School garden teachers and champions were being trained at the Hub where they also picked up garden transplants grown from seed by the GET students (which would provide produce for school lunches). And GET students began creating tasty dishes featuring local produce to test at the high school and take on the road to local elementary schools with the hope that some of these dishes will find their way to school lunch menus on a regular basis. The Farm to School to Work Hub is working, and students are receiving valuable training in horticulture, food production, food safety, and nutrition while operating it.
The amazing progress of the program is a result of an outpouring of community support. Forage Farm and the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agriculture Sciences were involved from the very beginning of the project and have been vital partners to its success. In addition, numerous other community supporters and donors have contributed money, equipment, and expertise that the project would not have been able to move forward without. This is a fruitful collaboration that mirrors the diversity and unity found in healthy food systems. The fruit is our students, growing healthy and preparing for the future.
