- Home
- News
- Forum
- Sports
- Features
- Arts
- Business
- Obituaries
- Comics
- Gallery
- Classifieds
- Commentary
- Advertisers
- Contact Us
4,134
1,557
Ready to grow: Farm to School plans countywide expansion
Details
What: Eighth Annual Village Feast, a fundraiser for the Davis Farm to School programs
When: noon Saturday, Aug. 25
Where: Central Park in Davis
Tickets: $75 each, available at the Davis Food Co-op, 620 G St., or online at www.brown
papertickets.com
The motto was simple from the start: “Sow it, grow it, reap it, eat it.”
And for 12 years, that’s exactly what Davis schoolchildren have been doing, thanks to a retired teacher, who even after 37 years of teaching, wasn’t quite ready to leave behind the students and the school gardens that had become her favorite classroom.
Dorothy Peterson started Davis Farm to School almost immediately upon retiring from Pioneer Elementary School in 1999, and since then, the program has flourished like the lettuce and basil and tomatoes now found growing in gardens at every Davis school.
Davis Farm to School teamed up with the school district’s central kitchen, helping bring healthier, tastier, locally grown food to school lunches, and brought an innovative recycling program to the school district that the California State PTA has encouraged every school in the state to replicate.
And now, having been so successful in its mission, Davis Farm to School has been asked by Yolo County Agriculture Commissioner John Young to take the program countywide.
The Davis Farmers Market Foundation, under which Davis Farm to School has always operated, will be renamed Yolo Farm to Fork, with Davis resident John Mott-Smith serving as president of the foundation. Davis Farm to School will continue to operate locally, while the foundation will assist other communities in getting their own farm-to-school operations up and running.
And though it took nearly a decade to get a garden in every Davis school, Peterson has no doubt the same can be done for all of Yolo County’s schools.
“Why can’t we take something like this to Woodland?” she asked. “Each school just needs someone who can follow the template.
“But they need to start with a garden first.”
———
It was former state Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin who began the call for “a garden in every school.”
The Davis Farm to School program helped plant the seeds by offering every school a $500 garden grant, provided the school was willing to match it.
“The first year we offered the grant,” Peterson said, “no one took it.”
“The second year, three schools took it. Then six. Then all of them.”
The gardens are all different, run according to the needs of the garden coordinators who oversee them, the teachers who use them in their curriculum and the space available at each site. And that’s the way it should be, Peterson said.
“We don’t want a cookie-cutter approach,” she explained.
Birch Lane Elementary School’s garden, overseen by longtime garden coordinator Debra Ariola, is actually many gardens, all over the campus, with every classroom assigned its own plot.
Fairfield Elementary School west of Davis has a large enough campus that the school has been able to provide a garden plot for every student.
Emerson Junior High’s gardens are featured in the curriculum of just about every subject taught there, including math, history, science, foreign language and art.
The gardens have even started to become self-sustainable. At Birch Lane, Ariola has always held regular garden sales to raise money for the garden program, selling plants and holiday wreaths as well as garden-inspired artwork and jewelry made from recycled materials.
And through a pilot project under way at three sites this summer, school gardens are growing and selling produce to the school district’s central kitchen to be used in future school lunches. Right now it’s basil being grown, which the central kitchen will flash-freeze and have available for recipes all year long.
Throughout the year, it’s hoped that school gardens will continue to provide herbs and produce, including cilantro, garlic, tomatoes, bell peppers and more, all of which will end up back at the schools in the form of school lunches.
“It’s a good way to show kids that a garden can be a business,” Peterson noted.
———
And while school gardens may well represent the essence of Davis Farm to School, it’s what happens after the children eat that has become increasingly important.
“You start with the garden,” said Peterson, “but whatever comes from the earth must return to the earth.”
With the creation of the DavisRISE program — which stands for Recycling is Simply Elementary — Davis students increasingly have been doing their part for the Earth, not to mention for the school district’s budget.
Thanks to Davis Farm to School’s efforts to get recycling and composting programs up and running at Davis schools, the district has been able to save more than $100,000 in garbage fees, Peterson said.
As with the school gardens, it started small, with pilot projects at three sites: Birch Lane, César Chávez and Pioneer elementary schools. Davis Waste Removal was a huge supporter early on, said Peterson, providing compost bins and anything else the program needed, while Davis Farm to School taught recycling coordinators at each site how to teach the children to recycle.
The schools — and kids — got so into it, they started competing to see who could reduce the most. Chávez was an early winner.
DavisRISE is now a school district program, with the district paying recycling coordinators at each school a stipend for their work, and students are diverting all rigid plastics, glass, aluminum, paper and food waste from the garbage stream.
———
Meanwhile, the food they are eating has earned a reputation around the world for excellence, thanks in large part to Davis Farm to School. The program has partnered with the school district’s School Nutrition Services to help increase the fresh fruit and vegetables purchased from local farmers for school lunches.
And it’s about to get even easier — and more economical — for nutrition services programs around the county to buy local. Capay Organic has volunteered its West Sacramento warehouse as a centralized food distribution point for all the schools in the county, Peterson said, so districts can work together, deciding what they want to order, where they want to purchase it (within a 300-mile radius) and have it all delivered to that one location.
“Then Capay will be our one delivery system,” Peterson said.
Davis Farm to School’s involvement doesn’t end when the food arrives at the central kitchen either. The program provides five cooking lessons a year to kitchen staff so they can use locally grown, seasonal items in made-from-scratch recipes.
Of course, Davis Farm to School isn’t just about school — it’s about the farms, too. That’s why the program has a tradition of helping to send all second-graders in Davis on farm visits. They’ve used their biggest annual fundraiser — the Village Feast — to help pay for field trips for those who couldn’t afford them. Just by asking for donations at last year’s feast, Peterson said, they raised more than $1,000, enough to pay for more than 50 students’ farm visits.
This year’s Village Feast takes place on Saturday, Aug. 25, in Central Park. Members of Davis High School’s Future Farmers of America — another beneficiary of Davis Farm to School’s efforts — will be on hand from noon to 1 p.m. to talk about their programs and serve a special treat — fresh cantaloupe appetizers, thanks to a generous donation of melons from the Harris Moran Seed Company. The feast itself gets under way at 1 p.m.
Tickets are $75 each and are on sale now at the Davis Food Co-op, 620 G St., and at http://www.brownpapertickets.com. Attendees will get a chance to hear from Young and Mott-Smith about Yolo Farm to Fork and plans for bringing farm-to-school programs to every school in the county.
It’s absolutely doable, Peterson said.
“It’s not daunting,” she said, “because every step forward, even when you have some steps backward, you’re still moving forward.
“All of the businesses in town have made it possible to do what we’ve done,” she said of Davis Farm to School. “And now we need to reach out to other communities. My goal is to have this countywide in five years.”
After all, she noted, in five years she’ll be 77. And it just may be time to move on to something new.
— Reach Anne Ternus-Bellamy at [email protected] or (530) 747-8051. Follow her on Twitter at @ATernusBellamy
Comments
Recent Posts
