Vickie Dunaway, the school nutrition director for the Milan Special school district in rural West Tennessee, can rattle off an impressive list of fresh fruits and vegetables that were part of the district’s cafeteria meals, until recently: strawberries, blackberries, apples, tomatoes, corn, broccoli, and romaine lettuce.
In her 10-year stint as a nutrition director, Dunaway has been keen on setting up a farm-to-table pipeline of locally sourced, fresh produce for school lunches. The $660 million Local Food for Schools program, introduced in 2021 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, finally gave her the money and resources to do so.
“When the opportunity came, it was a no-brainer,” she said. “This is exactly what I’d been trying to do.” This school year, Dunaway had about $120,000 to spend on local produce. She was looking forward to another infusion of money for the upcoming school year, when the rug was suddenly pulled out from under the program.
As part of its cost-cutting efforts, the Trump administration canceled the Local Food for Schools program, along with a similar program that supports food banks, on March 11. These programs “no longer effectuate the goals of the agency,” the USDA wrote in an email to several news outlets.
The Local Food for Schools program, which gave schools and child care facilities the opportunity to buy food locally from small farms and producers, was created by the Biden administration through executive action, so it could be undone in the same way.
The move shook Dunaway, who had made plans not only to serve more fresh produce in school lunches but also to expand a drive-through pickup option for parents. Throughout the summer, the district had planned to send seven days’ worth of lunches and dinners back home with parents, with an option for parents to also get fresh produce, like whole heads of cabbage, peas, and broccoli, to cook at home.
Dunaway has some money allocated for meals for the summer months, but not enough for the full drive-through program she envisioned.
“I felt sick to my stomach when I found out we weren’t going to get [produce for] summer meals,” she said. “I just feel sick—like a very heavy burden on me that I cannot provide [for] my families like I provided in the past.”
Next year, the district may use $30,000 from its general year to buy food from local producers, she said.
Local Food for Schools program benefited both schools and local producers
Just down the road in Trenton, Tenn., Lisa Seiber-Garland, the school nutrition and federal finance director for the special school district there, used part of the $150,000 allocated to her through the Local Food for Schools program to purchase beef from a local farm. The preservative-free sausages and hamburger patties, paired with hydroponic butter lettuce from another local source, she said, were a hit with the students.
At every school lunch, Seiber-Garland let students know they were eating meals produced by local ranchers and farmers. It changed the food preferences from some students, too, as they began asking their parents to source vegetables and fruits from these local producers, Seiber-Garland said.
There is a substantial price difference, though, when schools source local produce instead of getting it from a national wholesaler like Sysco. A school district can end up paying twice or three times the price for locally sourced cucumbers, for instance—costing up to $30 instead of the usual $13, said Thomas Smith, the director of operations at the Kansas City Food Hub, a cooperative group of more than 35 farmers in the Kansas City area.
Smith said the group was able to connect several individual farmers to districts and set up distribution channels with the money coming in from the federal program.
Parents who received some of the fresh produce from schools are feeling the loss, too. Josh Bomar, a father of five whose children go to school in Dunaway’s district, said the family was able to cut their $1,500 monthly grocery bill in half, thanks to the school’s take-home options. He also noticed his kids’ school lunches seemed fresher and healthier.
The program allowed a budding ecosystem between schools and local producers to flourish—something that nutrition directors like Dunaway were trying to build on their own.
“A one-acre organic farm, run by a family, can’t produce enough to even feed a school district, sometimes even a whole school,” Smith said. But through the program, “they could come together to aggregate supply.”
The program “energized” the whole process, and for the first time, the KC Food Hub had inquiries from schools who had the money to spend. The food hub, acting as the middle man, set up an order management system for school cafeteria managers, who could order anything from lettuce and cantaloupes to rarer produce like shitake mushrooms to put on pizzas. The customizable orders also included products like pickle, jams, and gluten-free baked goods.
The federal program also allowed individual farmers to bulk up their capacity to supply school districts with specific food products. One farmer, a member of the KC Food Hub cooperative, has hired extra workers, increased her farm acreage, and bought new equipment because a fourth of her sales were now coming from school supply runs. Now, said Smith, the farmer needs to think about restricting the debt she took on for the expansion.
Districts will need to fund this ecosystem on their own
Both Dunaway and Seiber-Garland are now adjusting next year’s food budgets and looking for other sources of funding to continue buying locally.
Dunaway will only source fresh produce like strawberries or cabbage a few times a year, instead of the weekly run she did with the federal money. She said she will try and maintain her relationships with local producers, but it will be hard without the stream of federal money.
Seiber-Garland said she didn’t include fresh produce in the “commodity list” she prepared for her wholesale partners and now has to increase that budget to get fruit and canned vegetables from them. The school board, though, has been receptive to Seiber-Garland’s appeal for more money to source food locally—an effort that involved serving school board members a meal of steak, salad, and blackberry compote, all made from locally sourced ingredients.
While some school districts have already received—and spent—their Local Food for Schools grants, others are waiting for the last of the promised money to come in. Malik Hamilton, the director of food services for Pittsburgh public schools, said the funds from the grant, which he’s expecting to receive soon, will help expand their budget for local produce—it’s currently 15% of their total food spend, which could go up to 17%.
Hamilton, a chef by training, set up purchasing contracts with his distributors that prioritize sourcing locally when he joined the district in 2016.
“Local economies, valued workforce, nutrition, animal welfare, environmental sustainability, and equity are some of those standards we’re looking for” when buying a product, he said. “It changes the quality of the meals that we’re serving. Rather than having a burger that’s full of soy and other fillers, the students are getting a 100% beef burger.”
During the summer months, the district buys local produce like watermelons and peas and is trying to increase its processing capacity to freeze some of that seasonal produce to use throughout the year. Being part of a local cooperative with over 120 school districts, with a combined purchasing potential of $40 million, has helped keep prices for local foods reasonable for schools, Hamilton said. The schools also get their dairy products from a local dairy cooperative of over 50 farms.
The Local Food for Schools money would have boosted these efforts, Hamilton said, but the program’s cancellation will make it harder to build a sustainable program, beyond the purchasing agreements already in place.
On Wednesday, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, filed a lawsuit against the USDA, arguing that it had illegally canceled a three-year, $13 million contract under a separate, similar program. The Local Food Purchasing Assistance program, like Local Food for Schools, was a grant set up for states to buy local produce from farmers for schools, child care centers, and food banks.
The ultimate impact of these program cancellations will be on families that can’t afford to buy fresh produce regularly, said Dunaway. During the grant period, Dunaway used her Facebook page to promote the dishes parents cooked with the fresh produce, like a smoked cabbage and sausage dish made by Bomar, the father of five.
“The parents are going to feel this before the kids do,” Dunaway said. “When you have children to feed, every dollar counts.”
