California’s Farm to School Program is opening up a new market for certain growers and coalescing support behind locally sourced nutritious eating. As the program hits its fourth year and starts to scale up, however, growing pains have started to show.
The novel program took much of the attention during a lengthy discussion on specialty crop issues at the State Board of Food and Agriculture on Tuesday. CDFA Secretary Karen Ross explained that schools are looking for healthy foods and the department is helping to fill that need. She pointed out that CDFA has hired 14 regional leads to act like matchmakers building relationships between farmers and schools, and it plans to hire two more.
“This is a huge positive for us,” said Ross. “I am so over the moon.”
The Newsom administration has invested $90 million into the program and the governor hopes to protect any unallocated funding for that program amid the budget deficit, according to a Ross during a budget presentation to stakeholders in January. She thanked First Partner Jennifer Seibel Newsom for her commitment to the program and noted that 1.5 million school children have benefited from it.
While the initiative has been inspiring, it has also been challenging for Marcus Hunt, who works at Shanley Farms, which runs small operations in Morro Bay and Visalia and mainly produces avocados and passion fruit.
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“We’re really getting crushed by the packing houses,” he said, explaining how the family farm often loses out on retail contracts after being outbid by larger operations. “We're putting in all the risk, we’re putting in all the hard work and we don't really have control.”
The solution they found was to go directly to the institutions, which made Farm to School appealing. The program’s micro purchasing option, which caps bids at $10,000, has worked well for the farm. But Hunt has struggled to maintain those bids later in the process, when schools are required to secure two other bids and a better price often comes from a larger distributor. The schools must also route purchases through distributors, even though Hunt found that both the farm and the schools could save money through direct sales.
He has discovered Farm to School through the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) and their Farms Together program, which taps into money from USDA’s Local Food Purchasing Assistance Program to connect farms to distributors and food banks.
Hector Reider, who directs CAFF’s farm to market initiative, added that micro purchasing is difficult for schools, since local food is expensive and they can only use one farmer three times.
Similar challenges have plagued Harold McClarty, who owns HMC Farms, a small tree fruit and table grape producer in the San Joaquin Valley. His company sells about a million small packages of grapes a week to the Los Angeles Unified School District, along with other districts.
“[The school programs] are basically done at cost,” said McClarty, though he acknowledged that he is getting new customers through this.
Rather than monetary gain, his motivation to get involved in Farm to School was to try to change eating habits by promoting more nutritious foods, and he argued the value in that extends far beyond anything the government could put into an incentive program.
In a release Tuesday CDFA said it is accepting applications for the 2023-24 California Farm to School Incubator Grant Program, until 5 p.m. PDT April 4, 2024. The agency will make a total of up-to $52.8 million in grants available via four funding tracks. Interested parties can visit the California Farm to School Incubator Grant Program webpage to view the formal request for applications, access the online portal for applications and register for informational webinars.
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