“Mystery meat?” Obsolete!

Instead, a growing number of Wisconsin school children, including those at local districts, know exactly where their hamburger patties come from—often, that’s a farm just down the road.

The “Farm-to-School” (F2S) movement aims to connect local food producers with food service directors at area schools. The idea is that spending food dollars locally helps boost the regional economy while putting more nutritious (and tastier) meals into our kids.

F2S is nothing new—early efforts in Wisconsin date back more than two decades. But local farmers and others involved in the movement say that interest has grown since the pandemic.

Nationwide, some of the ingredients in local school lunches are “commodities” supplied by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), according to Tammy Vaassen, Executive Director of the Wisconsin Beef Council. During the pandemic, that system began to break down.

“Food service directors were having issues getting their USDA beef commodity delivery,” Vaassen said. “Our work to connect directors to local beef producers increased incrementally during the pandemic.”

Challenging logistics

One of those local beef producers is Boscobel’s Spring Creeks Cattle Company. Located not far from Steuben, the farm is one of a half-dozen local operations that sell directly to school districts.

Spring Creeks is a multigenerational affair run by two generations of the Mitchell family. Founded by Bob and Rhonda Mitchell some four decades ago, the operation is now split between brothers Bart, Matt, and Scott—who roughly divide their duties into caring for the herd, running the fleet of trucks, and growing crops, respectively.

Amy Mitchell, Bart’s wife, manages the F2S aspects of the business. With institutional buyers like school districts, direct sales are far more complicated than selling off the back of a pickup truck.

Working with school districts involves a lot of logistics, she explained: She serves as point of contact for several districts’ food service directors, as well as a number of local meat lockers where Spring Creeks’ cattle are processed.

Part of that complexity comes from the strict rules for nutrition required by the federal government, designed to ensure that kids have healthy meals at school.

To that end, the Wisconsin Beef Council has prepared a guide for food service professionals that offers tips on handling and cooking beef, as well as how to incorporate local sources of beef into the kitchen supply chain—and how to account for those lunch-plates in the national nutritional requirements.

For food service directors, an additional consideration is the logistics that take place inside the kitchen itself. These busy workplaces must serve hundreds of children every day, often breakfast and lunch.

“We’re always looking for local foodstuffs, but it’s tricky,” said Jennifer Kapinus, who runs the kitchen at North Crawford School District. “For example, our kids really like roasted brussels sprouts. I can order from our vendor, and they’re already halved. But if I get them from the farmer, they might not be halved. Timewise it’s a struggle for us.”

Still, local districts, including North Crawford, source a significant portion of their food from local producers. “We’re really proud of the quality of the food we serve here,” Kapinus said.

Building resilience

If F2S programs got a bump from supply chain disruptions during the pandemic, the movement only appears to be growing in the post-pandemic world.

In part, that’s because a number of federal grants are supporting school lunch programs in developing F2S programs. Some of that funding helps offset the higher prices of local food; other grants enlist AmeriCorps students as procurement helpers, saving time for food-service directors.

Wisconsin’s AmeriCorps F2S program also maintains the Wisconsin Local Foods Database, a public directory of both farms with food to sell, and school districts that want to buy it. Farmers and school officials can add their information to the database.

Part of the rationale for programs like these is to build more resilience in the food industry. The pandemic laid bare weaknesses in how we grow and deliver food. Increasingly, local foods are seen as a solution to these weaknesses.

“Whenever you’re thinking about procurement, having a national, regional, and local pool to pull from will make the business much more resilient,” explained Randy Jones, who serves in Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) as Assistant Director on the USDA procurement team.

“During the pandemic, the regional and national suppliers just didn’t have product available,” he said. “Schools bought not only from local farms, but also local suppliers—meat processors, bread and milk vendors. And it hasn’t gone back to the way it used to be.”

The multitude of grants and programs—through the USDA, DPI, and other federal and state agencies—aimed at building the F2S movement

are aimed at shoring up these weaknesses, Jones explained.

“It’s all in response to improving constraints in the supply chain,” he said.

Real beef

Next time you host a barbeque, give your guests a choice: Would they prefer a big, juicy, never-frozen burger made from 100 percent beef? Or would they rather eat a watery, pale-gray bargain-binburger made from textured soy protein with a little mystery meat sprinkled into it?

So why should kids be any different?

Students notice and appreciate it when the meat comes from local sources, according to Sarah Ashmore, Director of Food Service for the Boscobel School District.

“They definitely prefer it over the stuff we get from our suppliers,” she said. “It’s just better quality.”

At North Crawford, Kapinus said, kids also notice the difference.

“Very much so. Especially when we switched from the government beef patties—I would use the word beef questionably— they were like, ‘This is real meat,’” she said. Today, the district sources all its beef locally.

For Amy Mitchell, that’s one of the rewards for the work she puts into her relationships with school districts.

Direct sales account for a small portion of the Spring Creeks’overall income stream, she said. (Though on a farm, every little bit counts.) But it has an outsized intangible result—it builds relationships between the people who grow the food, and those who eat it.

“That’s a big part of why I do it—because I appreciate people knowing where their food comes from and buying and supporting their local farmers,” Mitchell said. “I like hearing when food service directors tell me that the students know when they have the local beef.”

At the end of the day, the F2S movement is as much about teaching students that difference as it is anything else. After all, if today’s schoolchildren are tomorrow’s leaders, shouldn’t we send them into the world with an educated palate?