training ground review

hello, everyone. this is maggie goslin andi'm joined by my colleague laura brown, and we're both part of the national farm to schoolteam. so welcome and thank you for joining us today and thank you especially for signingup to be a farm to school grant program reviewer. we're in our second year of operating thisprogram now, and we feel like we're going into it a little less blindly. so we hopethat your experience as a reviewer is going to be made better by all the great feedbackthat we received from reviewers last year. today we're going to be giving an introductionto farm to school and to usda's farm to school program for all of you. and the purpose ofthis presentation is really just to make sure that all of our reviewers have a solid understandingof what the farm to school movement is all

about and what role the usda is playing insupporting it, including a short history of the grant program that you're going to behelping to support. and more importantly, it's a chance for you all to ask questions,which is why we're going to keep the lecturing part of this as brief as possible and leaveroom for as many questions and we will still try to keep it within the hour. as you know,we're also holding webinars next week about the specifics of reviewing the different typesof grant proposals. and i believe that you've all been sent an email by laura brown thatlets you know what type of proposal you're going to be reviewing. also, this is goingto be a pretty basic introduction, so for those of you who are already familiar withfarm to school and don't have any questions

for us, we won't be offended if you decideto spend this hour or 45 minutes doing other things and you drop off the webinar. thatis fine. if it's feeling too basic for the level you are at, we don't want to waste yourtime. so just one matter of housekeeping here. you're welcome and encouraged to ask questionsand to make comments during and after the presentation, and to do so you can eitheruse the q&a tab at the top of your screen, and that's probably best for any questionsor comments you have during the presentations. or you can ask the operator to unmute yourline by pressing star one. so just a quick overview of what we're going to be coveringtoday. first i will define farm to school and talk a little bit about the growing farmto school movement, and then laura will talk

about how and why usda is involved. she'llbust some farm to school myths and walk you through the evolution of a local menu. andthen we'll give you a few resources, and of course have time to take your questions. solet's get started by just talking about what farm to school is. it's about serving localfoods to kids and teaching them through hands-on experiences and other experiences about wheretheir food comes from, how it's grown, and how to eat healthfully. so let's look at thesetwo different components, kind of a procurement piece and the education piece, and just alittle more (inaudible). so farm to school encompasses efforts that connect schools withlocal food producers in order to serve their products to children in cafeterias and classrooms.and at usda we're usually talking when we

talk about this procurement piece about servinglocal foods to kids through the school meal programs that usda operates. so what typesof local foods are we talking about? well, one of the misconceptions that we often comeacross is that farm to school is just about fresh fruits and vegetables. and it's not.it's about lots of products and it's not just about farmers either. so local and regionalfoods can include beans, grains and flour, meat, poultry, fish, condiments, herbs, eggsand dairy. and also fresh and frozen foods. and these products can come from local farmers,ranchers, fisher people, food processors and distributors of all sizes. so fresh fruitsand vegetables are a common and kind of a logical starting place for local procurement.fresh fruits are especially easy because a

lot of them can be served with little to nopreparation beyond washing. but some of the most comprehensive farm to school programs,and a lot of those that we're supporting with our grants this year and that we'll continueto support in the future, they incorporate local products into all of the food categories.and some of the more developed programs might adjust existing recipes and menus to accommodatelocal products, for example, using bison in place of beef or local barley in place ofrice. some of them are developing entirely new recipes and menus based on their localproducts and also their local food traditions. and some of them are using the summer monthsto preserve the local abundance, so, for example, cutting corn off the cob and freezing it forlater. and as i mentioned these local products

can come to schools through a lot of differentchannels, and all of these channels are not necessarily exclusive of each other, so ithink the image people have when they think about farm to school is of a single farmerpulling up to the back door of the school cafeteria with his truck and dropping thingsoff. that often happens, but a lot of schools are also getting local foods through theirregular distributors, through the food service management companies that they work with,through food processors, definitely from individual producers, also from producer co-ops, so theseare, you know, food hubs, and these co-ops where producers have organized into thesecooperatives and they kind of aggregate their products and combine them (inaudible) efforts.and sometimes these groups are more likely

than a single producer to be able to fulfilllarge orders or to deliver directly to schools, and sometimes, even, to provide some minimalprocessing. and then finally some local foods are even coming from school gardens. schoolgardens aren't usually -- they don't usually produce enough food to make up a significantportion of the school meal, but fruits and vegetables and eggs are certainly served onsalad bars and as snacks. so what is local? usda doesn't have a set definition of local.we say that school food authorities can define local themselves based on their unique needsand their proximity to agricultural areas. so local (inaudible) mean a different thingfor every school district or school. and there are a lot of options for how to define local,so local for one school might mean within

the county, while local for another mightinclude the entire state or even adjacent states. and the images on this side illustratethe three possible definitions of local for a school district in pierre, south dakota.in addition, you can have different definitions of local for different products. so, for instance,you can say that local fruit has to come from within the county but local dairy from withinthe state. and so let's get back to the educational component of farm to school. so in additionto the local food procurement, which tends to be a tiny bit more of a focus for usda,some school programs can include all sorts of learning opportunities such as farm visits,school gardening, cooking classes, these can be kind of one off things or they can be reallycomprehensive programs. and oftentimes these

lessons about food and agriculture and nutritioncan be integrated into the normal curricula, so especially the math and the science andthe health curriculum. so the first farm to school pilot projects were started in californiaand in florida in the late 1990s, and since then the farm to school movement has grownimmeasurably. so today the national farm to school network estimates that more than 2,000districts and 12,000 schools in all 50 states are doing some type of farm to school activity,and that nearly six million students are reached through these efforts. additionally around$13 million is spent on local food for school meals annually. and i just want to mentionthat these estimates from the national network are great, but in a matter of months we'reactually going to have an even better baseline

because this spring usda worked with our statepartners to survey as many districts in the country as we could to determine the prevalenceand the geographic distribution and characteristics of farm to school programs. and our goal wasto get at least 60% of districts in the country to respond, and we got almost 80%. so definitelybe looking for more information about this survey which is called the farm to schoolcensus. and part of the reason that farm to school programs have flourished so much inrecent years is because of institutional support from the federal government, but also fromstate governments and nonprofit organizations, so this slide just illustrates that a lotof states have created positions for farm to school coordinators who are responsiblefor supporting farm to school efforts statewide.

so this slide shows in green states that havedesignated a farm to school coordinator, or even maybe multiple coordinators, in theirdepartment of agriculture. and the next slides shows states that have a dedicated farm toschool coordinator in their state department of education. and then this slide shows boththe farm to school coordinators in ag and in ed and then the orange states are statesthat have a farm to school coordinator in both departments. in recent years a lot ofstates have also passed laws that support or authorize or fund farm to school activities,so in addition to establishing statewide programs and funding farm to school coordinators, thesestate-level farm to school laws have established the task forces, work groups, interagencycouncils, they've established pilot programs

and allocated funding to farm to school grantprograms, promotional programs. the list goes on and on. so this slide shows states thathave some type of farm to school legislation. so why has farm to school become so popular?so i hear kind of anecdotal reasons why farm to school works and is great all the time.this slide lists the benefits that are supported by research, so farm to school programs strengthenchildren's and communities' knowledge about agriculture, food, nutrition and the environment.they increase children's consumption of fruits and vegetables. they increase market opportunitiesfor farmers, fishers, ranchers, food processors and food manufacturers. and they also supporteconomic development across numerous sectors. and the best farm to school programs tendto engage a lot of stakeholders. and this

is actually one of the things that i lovemost about farm to school is that it brings together students and teachers and parentsand grandparents and community members, food service staff, maintenance staff, food producers,local organizations, state agencies. the list kind of goes on and on. and right now i'mworking with our current class of grantees, some of whom have convened these amazing groupsof people to put their heads together to work on procurement and education, and so i thinkmatt's going to talk a little bit more about this in next week's webinar, but this is absolutelysomething that we look for in strong proposals. so with that, i'm going to pass it over tolaura brown who is going to talk a little bit more about usda's role in supporting allof this. thanks very much, maggie. hi, everyone.

it's laura brown with the farm to school programat usda. why is usda involved? well, for several reasons. farm to school is directly tied tousda's strategic plan and is a priority for secretary tom vilsack. our strategic planthat we have in place now for the years 2010 to 2015 is directly supportive of -- farmto school is directly supportive of two of those goals. and there's very much a lot ofsupport from not only usda, but of this entire administration, and we're seeing that throughoutusda and other federal agencies as well. there are several existing federal partners in farmto school programs. here at the usda we have a know your farmer, know your food task force,which is an inter-agency effort to carry out president obama's commitment to strengtheninglocal and regional food systems. know your

farmer, know your food began in 2009 and establisheda farm to school team, at which time several of our colleagues participated in site visitsin farm to school programs across the country identifying best practices and challengesposed to farm to school programs. and those observations were summarized in the reportthat was released in 2011. additionally, the first lady's let's move initiative is verysupportive of farm to school programs. you may be aware of the let's move salad barsto school initiative as well as let's move chefs to school initiative, which is aboutsupporting -- establishing salad bars in school cafeterias which creates a wonderful opportunityfor farm to school products to be featured in the cafeteria. as maggie mentioned, freshfruits and vegetables are often an easy and

logical starting point for many farm to schoolprograms. and let's move chefs to school is about bringing whether they be well-renownedchefs or just a great outstanding chef in the local community, bringing them into theschool and piloting some new menu items for the children to taste. the people's gardeninitiative is a collaborative effort led by usda to establish community and school gardensacross the country. and the farm to school program is also a component of the healthieru.s. school challenge. the farm to school program is operated by the food and nutritionservice, which also operates several supplemental feeding programs as you see here. for thepurposes of our grant program, which we'll get into a little bit more next week, thegrant program is specifically targeted to

impact those who participate in the nationalschool lunch and breakfast program, but farm to school programs can be operated throughouta plethora of child nutrition programs, and we're seeing them more and more throughoutthe other programs that you see here, during summer feeding, during after school snacks,the fresh fruit and vegetable program, more and more we're seeing locals being incorporatedinto those various programs. the healthy hunger-free kids act, which was passed in 2010, broughtabout sweeping reforms to the child nutrition programs, and section 243 of that act directedthe secretary to improve access to local foods in eligible schools. the farm to school programwas established by the healthy hunger-free kids act and really put a strong emphasison increasing the amount of local and regional

products in school cafeterias as well as increasingthe students' knowledge about where their food comes from. in addition to just establishinga farm to school program at usda. the farm to school grant program was also establishedby the healthy hunger-free kids act. usda is given $5 million annually for trainingand technical assistance to increase farm to school programs across the country as wellas further scale up existing farm to school programs. as maggie mentioned, last year wasthe first year of our grant program, and so we're now in our second year and we're feelinga little bit better than our first year of just trying to sort things out and see howthings are going to operate. last year we had two different types of grants. this yearwe have three different types of grants, and

so you all will be reviewing at least oneof these types of grants. planning grants were really intended for schools and schooldistricts that were just getting started on farm to school activities. so perhaps a schoolhas a school garden but they aren't really incorporating that garden into their classroomactivities or curriculum and they want to increase the amount of education, or perhapsthey've operated a harvest-of-the-month program where they try one food item per month butthey really want to scale that up and see more local items throughout the school year.implementation grants were for schools and school districts who wanted to further developexisting programs. schools that have been operating farm to school programs and justwant to take that next step to further incorporate

local and regional every day into the cafeteria.and lastly, our support service grants were intended for entities that were working withschools to further develop support of farm to school programs. so, for example, a statedepartment of agriculture could submit a proposal to work with either all districts in theirstate or a select group of districts that they feel really would benefit from some hands-onfarm to school program, meaning from a state agency. last year, in our first year, we receivedalmost 400 applications. they came from 49 states plus the district of columbia. we almostgot applications from all 50 states, and we're eager to see what we got this year. we ultimatelymade 68 awards in 37 states as well as the district of columbia, and those awards wentto large cities, such as chicago and i believe

san diego, as well as really small rural citiesas well. jackman, maine, which has a population of about 700 people, to the plains, all overthe place. we estimate that we're impacting about 3,000 schools and impacting nearly twomillion students. as many of you are familiar, the healthy hunger-free kids act did bringabout sweeping reforms to the school meal pattern, and this is the first year of implementingthat new meal pattern. so schools are already seeing more fruits and vegetables on the lunchline, an emphasis on whole grain as well as low fat and non-fat milk. calorie ranges wereset based on grade levels, and it created more of a food space menu. we feel that thiscreates a really great opportunity to incorporate local and regional throughout the cafeteriaand throughout all types of menu items. like

we said, fruits and vegetables are a greatand very logical starting point for farm to school programs, and farm to school programsthat are a little bit further along may be creating entire menu items based around whatis locally and regionally available. many of you may be on the line from some of ourregional offices. thank you all again for your participation. the food nutrition servicedoes have seven regional offices throughout the state, and within each of those sevenregional offices we have a designated farm to school lead. those leads are our eyes andears on the ground and providing great training and technical assistance to schools and schoolfood authorities across the nation. in addition to our seven regional leads, we also havefive in the national office. maggie goslin

and myself, as well as our colleague mattrussell, who is our grants manager. you all have probably seen lots of communicationsfrom matt russell as well. we also have christina canal and our national director, deborah kane.so let's look a little bit about how local foods can look on the menu. so here we havea menu which is representative of the new meal pattern. say, for example, a school isjust getting started in farm to school, and we always tell schools when they ask, howcan i start farm to school, we simply just say, just get started. just pick one itemand try to work it into your existing menu that you have. so an example here, say forexample it's may and the school knows that local strawberries are really abundant inmay. so for the month of may they decide to

operate a harvest-of-the-month program, andthey just menu strawberries one day out of that month. maybe they put some promotionalsign in the cafeteria to let students know that the strawberries are from farmer joe,just 70 miles away. maybe they're incorporating some teachings about strawberries into theclassroom. maybe they're even taking a farm field trip out to that strawberry patch todo some picking of their own after they see it on the lunch line. from there the schoolthen contacts their existing food service director and asks where they're getting theirmilk from. very often we're finding that milk is delivered to schools that is produced fromwithin that state. it's often a more economical way to get milk rather than buying acrossstate lines. so if that meets your definition

of local, that's a great item that you canmarket as local. from there, scaling up just kind of seems to happen. perhaps the schoolstarts working with the strawberry farmer and his neighbor down the road has a reallygreat carrot and broccoli farm, and so next thing you know the school is able to menufresh carrots and broccoli from their local community. as maggie mentioned earlier, we'reseeing some schools use local bison in place of beef. that's a great way to offer whatis locally and regionally available, as well as procuring whole grains and having a bakercreate something for you to use in your lunch line. some schools that are quite far alongin their farm to school planning are able to create menu items based around what islocally and regionally available. one of our

grantees right now in montana is working ona program to work with their local lentil farmers to procure a protein-rich lentil pattythat they can use in their meal. others that are either on the coastal states have a goodchance of getting local fish. we're seeing a lot of fish to school programs, or boatto school programs. that's another excellent way to source a local protein item into yourlunch line. so throughout this presentation i hope we've busted some myths about whatfarm to school is and what farm to school isn't. i'm going to go through a few here.as maggie mentioned, farm to school is not just about farmers. it includes farmers, ranchers,fishermen, food processors, distributors, of all shapes and sizes. it's also not justabout fresh produce. fresh produce is a very

easy and logical starting point, but as yousaw on the menu slides we just went through, it can include dairy products, baked goodswith local whole grains, cheese on the pizza, tomatoes on the tortilla, the meat in thetortilla. the list goes on and on. it's not just about fresh produce. it's also inclusiveof herbs and condiments and other goods. usda does not have a set definition for local andwe expect all types of definitions for local. also as maggie shared, that definition oflocal can vary by product or even by season. perhaps in the fall it's easier for a schoolto get local tomatoes, but it's a little bit more difficult for them to use that same definitionof local in the springtime. maybe they have to expand that a little bit further. that'scompletely acceptable, and we're seeing those

types of definitions all over the country.and these local products can be delivered either directly from the farmers through existingdistributors. i know sometimes smaller schools are even going to the farms and picking itup themselves because they have that capacity. so it's not just dependent on the direct deliveriesfrom the farmers. other great farm to school programs will also procure the local productand have it sent to a food processing facility where that food can be prepared in a mannerthat is easier for the school to serve it on their lunch line. and i hope we've bustedthis myth. usda is interested in all types of activities related to farm to school, whetherthat be school gardens, or curriculum integration, or serving more local and regional in thecafeteria. farm to school is about all of

that, and we're proud to see a lot of schoolsincorporating it throughout their school day. and we didn't talk about this too much, butwe did mention that it's inclusive of all types of producers. it's not just about organicor sustainable products. conventional and processed. fresh and frozen. all types ofproducts can be inclusive of a farm to school program. and as i mentioned, while our grantprogram is specific to the national school lunch and breakfast program, farm to schoolin general are not just about the national school lunch program. we're seeing them insummer feeding programs, after school snack programs, the fruit and vegetable program,the list continues. i'd like to direct you to some resources. our website has many differentresources listed and you can also sign up

for our eletter on our website. we send aneletter every other week, and it's a great way to stay in touch with not only our team,but also what's going on across the country. we are happy to share what's going on withour other federal partners or other great standout farm to school programs from acrossthe nation. we'll mention this a bit more on next week's webinars when we get into thespecifics of the review process, but we also have a website dedicated to our grant program,which may be a good resource for you to refresh ahead of time. the request for applicationsis available on our website, and now that we've sent out the assignments for what typeof grant you're reviewing, you may want to familiarize yourself with the different typesof grants, who they're intended for, what

we were looking for in an application. but,again, we'll go over all of that in next week's webinar. and, again, those webinars are listedright here. next wednesday and thursday will be the next time that we chat. these webinarsare all recorded and it generally takes us about one to two weeks to get the recordingsprocessed. as soon as they're available, we will send them out to the entire group, soif for some reason you are unable to participate, you will have an opportunity to watch thewebinar at a later date. and with that i think we're going to open it up to questions. thereis my contact information as well as my colleague, matt russell's contact information. whilemaggie was a great presenter on today's presentation, she is not as involved with the review processas matt and i are. maggie works directly with

our planning grantees, and is very eager tosee what the next batch of awardees is going to look like coming up here. so as we mentionedin the beginning, you can either type in your question using the q&a tab at the top, oryou can press star one on your phone to open up the lines. excuse me, the operator willopen up the lines for you. our first question will come from heather. hi, heather, go ahead.yes, this is my -- well, i guess it could only be my second year since the program isonly two years old, but this is my first year through you, and i am an external reviewerfrom slow (sp) foods, and my question is are last year's grantees going to put togetherany kind of implementation reports that we might be able to look at to see logisticallyhow their plans worked out? i feel that would

be terribly helpful for me. or exit surveysor some sort of not necessarily accountability but just the logistics of implementing whenthey took the money how it worked out for them. sure. yes. so we definitely requireprogress reports, so we require them to submit two progress reports. one midway through theyear and one at the end of the grant period. so for this class of grantees that currentlyhas funding, they'll be submitting those reports, i believe they're not due until early nextyear. and then for the planning grantees one of the big deliverables for the planning grantis an implementation plan, which is a fairly structured plan. and so they'll also be submittingthose at the end of the grant period. and i'm not sure whether those documents willbe public or whether we'll just be summarizing

the information held in those documents andpossibly releasing some samples of those documents. does that help to address your question? yes.so if there weren't any available to the public or to reviewers, would it be fair to say thatwe might be able to individually talk to you all if we have questions about -- maybe thisis for our more specific webinars, to ask these questions, actually, now that i thinkabout it. i mean, i'm just concerned about my ability to look at something on paper andequate that to actually what would work in real life. yeah. it's a great question. ithink we're, you know, we're still struggling with that, too, because we're not, you know,unfortunately this class of grantees isn't done yet, so we don't know exactly how thosegreat proposals are going to translate into

the project. i can tell you that so far itseems like the projects are going great, but we're not going to have that information beforethe end of the grant period. still, you're welcome to ask questions during the webinarsfor the specific types of grants, or you're also always welcome to call any of us individuallyto talk about, you know. okay. discuss the questions that you have. we just had our nationalconference and i got to meet with alice waters about the edible school yard, and so she hadjust mentioned to me that even within that program there are some models that are supersuccessful and some that are not. so they're even trying within the edible school yardprogram to develop a model for everyone else to use. but it sounds like i may be able totalk to you all one on one if i have specific

questions, correct? yes. and over time wereally hope to build our kind of library of best practices. i mean, we're hoping thatwe're going to learn a lot about operating farm to school programs from our grantees.that's absolutely one of the goals of the program. and so i think in two or three yearswe're probably going to have a lot of resources related to exactly what you're talking about.right now we're so early on in the process that we don't have a whole lot. but, again,we're happy to talk to you. okay. thank you. and i'll just add a little bit to that. thereview teams are assembled into groups of three, so if you do have a question aboutsomething that you think looks really great on paper but you're kind of unsure about howthat would look in the practical sense, that's

a great question to pose to your group. maybeothers feel that same way and so therefore you feel the proposal is not very clear orit doesn't seem very doable for the school who had proposed such activities, and that'sa great conversation topic for your group that you guys can work through those issues.okay, thank you so much. thank you. next question will come from susan. hi. this is susan, andi'm an outside reviewer from the wic program in fns in dallas. my question is, is therea particular criteria with point values, etc. that we're going to be using and is that goingto be explained to us in our next conference calls in reviewing these grants? yes. so inthe request for application, all applicants were told exactly what they would be scoredon and how those various scoring categories

would be weighed, so we have a score sheetwhich will be distributed to all of you via an online tool. so when you're reading yourproposals you'll be able to log into the system, which we'll explain next week, and you cango in and award points for the various categories and make comments, and there are specificquestions to probe you to either make comments that are helpful for us in the scoring processor that are helpful for you to pick a score. some of the scores are on a scale of one toten, others on one to 25, and within each of those types of categories there's questionsthat should help you guess which type of point range you should assign. and we'll go overin great detail all that in next week's webinars. okay. so as teams are there like applicationsthat are split up among us or are we all reviewing

the same applications? yes. every group willreview all of the same applications. right now each group is reviewing anywhere fromsix to eight or nine applications. you'll all read and review the same, you'll all scorethem, and then you'll set up a conference call which will be established by your teamlead to walk through the different proposals and go through your score sheets. if you haveany questions, you can address them at those times, and just to hear other group members'concerns or support of various proposals. okay. thank you. laura, did you have anythingelse you wanted to say in conclusion? not at all. just a huge and sincere thank youfrom the entire farm to school team. we really appreciate all of your time reviewing theseapplications as well as participating on this

webinar. thank you for making time for us,and if ever you have any questions throughout the review process, you're more than welcometo contact either myself or matt. we're happy to help you with anything, and, again, wejust can't thank you enough. we're really thrilled to get the review process started.great. and i echo that thank you. i also wanted to mention that we'll definitely be askingfor some feedback from you about how this process goes, but if at any time you havefeedback, positive or negative, as long as it's constructive we're always open to it,so feel free to contact us with that at any time. and, again, thank you so much and havea great day.