Farm to Families in Southern Oregon
At eleven o’clock on a bright June day, as the sun warms the morning chill across Rogue Valley, cars packed with families line up at Jewett Elementary School in Central Point. One by one, they drive up to the school entrance where the school’s nutrition staff and volunteers pass out boxes filled with a day’s worth of food — a mix of pizza, sandwiches, and staples.
Today there’s something extra, a box filled with fresh vegetables and fruits from local farms. Amber Fry, program manager at Fry Family Farm where the boxes had been packed the day before, lists the inventory: two onions, four apples, six potatoes, a head of cabbage, bunched beets, carrots, and chard, one carton of blueberries, and two peaches. A booklet with recipes from local chefs and activities for kids ,”Food for Thought,” nestles among the sticks of green and red chard.
By one o’clock, when the drive-thru food pick-up closes for the day, up to 1,000 families will have come and gone at Jewett and seven other schools in Central Point. “We always have food available, we never turn anyone away,” says Anne Leavens, school nutrition supervisor for the district.
When asked that morning what fruits he likes best, nine-year-old Carlo says with a grin, “Today I got a little box of blueberries and they make me feel happy.”
“We got potatoes that I really, really like,” his sister says.
These siblings, and millions of children like them across America, belong to a largely invisible group, what the United States Department of Agriculture calls “food insecure”— “a condition,” according to the FDA, “in which households lack access to adequate food because of limited money or other resources.”
Hunger, then COVID
The statistics are startling: One in four children in America live in families that struggle to put food on the table, and the numbers in Oregon are among the highest in the nation. Here in Jackson County, roughly 27 percent of children live in food insecure households and 61 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced school meals.
In non-pandemic times, the US Department of Agriculture reports, households with children were nearly 1.5 times more likely to experience food insecurity than households without children — and more than 5 million children lived in these homes.
Then came the coronavirus. An analysis by the Brookings Institute found that in late June, 27.5 percent of households with children were food insecure, for a total of almost 14 million children.
School breakfast and lunch programs were already struggling to meet rising demand before the pandemic. With COVID-19 now keeping children out of school, many missed breakfast and lunch entirely.
Enter the USDA
At the USDA, the fallout from COVID focused less on the food insecure than on the potentially staggering losses to farmers and ranchers forced to dump produce and milk and euthanize animals because of supply-chain disruptions. Pairing this looming calamity with the overwhelming demands for food from newly hungry Americans offered a win-win.
Ivanka Trump stepped in, on May 15th at a wholesale produce company in Maryland, to announce the “Farmers to Families Food Box Program,” designed to buy up what farmers could not distribute and redistribute it to food banks. The program was fast-tracked in a way seldom seen. Proposals were due on May 1, a week later the USDA approved $1.2 billion in contracts, and on May 15 the first boxes began to make their way to food banks across the country. (Almost a quarter of the grants awarded, upon further investigations, went to agriculture operations with no experience working with groups feeding the hungry.)
When Sheila Foster, director of the nonprofit Rogue Valley School to Farm (RVFS), heard about the opportunity and mentioned it to her colleague, farmer Amber Fry, they both laughed. “It’s designed for the big guys and we’re just the little guys,” Foster reasoned.
But when they thought of the people needing help across the Valley, families and farmers alike, they sent in a proposal overnight. A week later they learned that they had won a grant totaling $900,000 for 12 weeks of operation, beginning June 5th.
A community rallies
Happily, the infrastructure was already in place. When the pandemic closed schools across the Rogue Valley (and Oregon at large) last spring, the system for distributing free school meals to “food insecure” kids quickly moved from school cafeterias to drive-through pickups. The distribution of weekly boxes of fresh produce piggy-backed on this system.
Fry Family Farm in Medford became the hub, a familiar role. For several years, the 100-acre farm had served as a central location for distribution of CSA — community supported agriculture — boxes from other local farms. The USDA food box program was, in effect, a free CSA for children and their families for whom fresh produce was hopelessly out of reach.
A tag team quickly emerged. Fry Family Farm gathered the week’s fruits and vegetables from local farmers, then over 30 RVFS volunteers helped pack the boxes at the Farm’s warehouse and delivered them to schools in four local school districts, where nutrition staff handled the distribution.
For families lacking transportation to one of the drive-through pick-ups, boxes travelled to them via a small school bus.
“Don’t yuck my yum”
The notion of linking farms and schools long preceded the Farm to Families Food Box program. Its roots were planted 25 years ago when a “Farm to School” movement sprouted nationwide, aimed at supporting community-based food systems, strengthening family farms, and promoting healthy eating. By 2004, the network included 400 programs in 22 states.
In Southern Oregon, Rogue Valley Farm to School became a key player. For a decade, RVFS hosted field trips where students visited a farm, picked produce, then prepared and ate lunch together. It also helped schools plant their own vegetable gardens.
Anna Boesch, farmer, educator and co-owner of Wandering Roots Farm in Gold Hill, explains:
It’s really important to us that the next generation knows about farming, that kids don’t think that food comes from the grocery stores. In 2014 we started hosting harvest meals where the kids come out on field trips, harvest the food from the fields, and come back to the kitchen to chop and prepare their lunch. A lot of kids expected not to like the lunch because it is vegetable heavy.
But with Farm to School we have a rule, that ‘You don’t yuck my yum.’ Sure enough, the kids are blown away with how good it tastes.”
Back at the drive-thru line at Jewett Elementary, kids offer their own opinions about vegetables.
“I like tomatoes by their selves, or with a little pepper and a little salt, actually, all salt,” says Josh.
Seventeen-year-old Catherine, who was helping her mother deliver boxes to families who could not travel to the school, says, matter-of-factly: “My favorite vegetable would be carrots.”
With his mother as translator, Max, who is hearing impaired, signs: “The vegetable boxes, why do we get them every week? Because we really need to eat healthy. Every day, every week, we should eat healthy so that we can grow up and become really strong.” He flexes his muscles and roars.
Adding it up and keeping on
When the Farm to Families program ended in mid-August, it had managed to distribute 24,000 boxes — 240,000 pounds of local, organic foods — to more than 2,000 families across the Rogue Valley.
In late August and again in early October, the USDA made additional grant funds available nationwide, but new rules made it difficult for the “small guys” to compete. And soon the catastrophic September 8 Almeda Fire sucked up all of the oxygen across the Valley, pushing shelter temporarily to the top of the list of urgent local needs. (Eighty percent of the children receiving free or reduced meals lost their home in the town of Phoenix; 50 percent in Talent.) RVFS pitched in wherever they could, including helping displaced farm workers.
Two months later, Rogue Valley Farm to School has returned to its longstanding effort to link school children and farmers around healthy eating. And it’s raising money to provide 250 boxes a week of fresh produce to survivors of the Almeda Fire.
In the last weeks of the program this summer, Sheila Foster told local film-maker Kathy Roselli:
One of the things that makes this program so inspiring is how it has brought together farmers and schools and farmworkers and children and parents. Everyone is coming together to feed our families.”
I am reminded, again, of Margaret Mead’s famous quote, about the power of a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens to change the world.
For the full documentary film (13 min) about Rogue Valley’s Farm to Families Food Box program, produced by Ashland film-maker (and friend), Kathy Roselli, see https://vimeo.com/445942654
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