Farm to School Resources for Students
Farm to School connects schools (K-12) and local farms by serving healthy meals in school cafeterias, improving student nutrition, providing food, farm, and nutrition education, and supporting local, family farmers. There are over 2,000 farm to school programs nationwide.
Activities can include featuring fresh, local food in school meals, hands-on cooking and taste testing, edible school gardening, field trips to farms, and standards-based experiential learning in the classroom.
For farm to school programs to be successful, students need to be involved on the ground-level. Here are a few helpful resources for students K- College.
Sign up for the Georgia Organics monthly Farm to School e-Bite for an updated list of grants, upcoming events and articles here.
How to Lead a Taste Test in the Classroom or Cafeteria
This guide, created by VT-FEED, is a great tool for students who want to get their peers engaged in trying new foods from the school garden or local farms. The guide includes a helpful survey template that any student from 1st grade to 12th grade can lead!
Create a local food video!
See what an Atlanta south east high school did with a local farmers market here.
Pope High School's Horticulture class creates fantastic videos based on food and farming. Check out one of their videos here. Also, watch some of these videos created by kids from across the US.
Here is a video that gets kids and adults excited about eating vegetables and rhymes.
Inspiring examples of youth-led programs:
The Rethinkers- New Orleans middle school food activists The Rethinkers are students in New Orleans who want to rethink and rebuild their schools after Hurricane Katrina. Their vision is simple: a great education for every kid in their city, no matter the color of their skin, what neighborhood they stay in or how much money their parents make. One of their first projects was rethinking school food. Check out their 2009 press conference here and read their 12 recommendations here.
The Food Project. Since 1991, The Food Project has built a national model of engaging young people in personal and social change through sustainable agriculture. Each year, they work with over a hundred teens and thousands of volunteers . Food from the farms is distributed through Community Supported Agriculture programs, Farmers' Markets, and to hunger relief organizations. The young people working in these programs participate in all of these distribution streams, giving them valuable job experiences and a personal connection to our food system and issues of food justice.
Real Food Challenge and the Southeast Youth Food ActivistsThe Real Food Challenge serves as both a campaign and a network for college students. The campaign is to increase the procurement of real food on college and university campuses, with the national goal of 20% real food by 2020. By leveraging their purchasing power we can catalyze the transformation of the larger food system. The network offers a chance for students and their allies (those working on the campaign along with those who've yet to sign on) to make connections, learn from one another, and grow the movement.
Check out Students Taking Charge. Students have a right to a healthy school! Students Taking Charge is a national program from Action for Healthy Kids for students to learn, join and take action to make their schools healthier places and to help themselves and their peers learn to eat right and be active every day.
Additional Resources just for Students!
The USDA has resources that were created with kids in mind. Check it out here. Bring some of these activities into your classroom to help inform other students.
Science is all around us. See how agriculutre and science relate to each other. This website also provides ideas for agriculutural science fair projects.
Videos can be a great education toool. Public Broadcasting Services focuses on the culinary adventures of chefs and children as they go in search of fresh ingredients from the farm and create delicious dishes from their finds.