Podcast

Transcript

Josh (00:00)

All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of the 5 in Twenty podcast by Remarkable Academic Foods. I'm your host, Joshua Miller, where we have at least another five questions in 20 something minutes today. And today's topic is on farm to school, which is our first time really diving into it on this podcast. So I'm super excited about it, particularly because I love supporting local purchasing. And with this, we have not one but two special guests with us

The first is Michelle Markesteyn, professor of practice, farm to school specialist at Oregon State University Extension. And the second is Rick Sherman, farm to school, school garden coordinator at the Oregon Department of Education. So not only are they guests on this episode, but they actually have their own podcast. So they're fellow podcasters, the Farm to School Podcast. It is perfectly named. if

Definitely want to get any more value out of the farm to school movement, make sure you check out their podcasts. So definitely heavy hitter value to drop your way.

Make sure you stay tuned for what they have to bring your way.

right, Rick and Michelle, thank you for taking the time to join in on this episode and talk with all of us about farm to school. And I can't wait to dive into this topic with both of you. And first and foremost, I'm going to throw my icebreaker right at you, which is going to be, what is your favorite vegetable and why, which is oddly appropriate for this

Michelle & Rick (01:39)

I love that question. I can answer it right away. Eggplant. I love growing eggplant. know, and it's great because a lot of people don't even like to eat it so I can have it all myself. But there's so many different kinds too. So I grow long, thin, skinny ones and large bulbous ones. I just love the color purple as well. Very few vegetables are purple. So it just makes me happy.

Josh (02:03)

So true, so true.

Michelle & Rick (02:05)

I grow so much. We live on a four acre farm and so I have a lot of things in production, but hands down eggplant. What about you? I love the color purple. There's that. That was a swell movie. You know, we have a saying in farm to school called don't yuck my yum. And if you don't care for something, you're not supposed to say anything disparaging about it.

Josh (02:16)

The movie or the car?

Michelle & Rick (02:34)

My dad grew up in the Depression and the only thing his mom knew how to grow was eggplant. So they had gardens full of eggplant. So he never allowed it in the house. But one time I had eggplant parmesan, I thought it was lasagna. And I thought, what is this? And so it's not my favorite thing. It's kind of funny where we're so alike, but we're so different. We could never work between us, But anyway.

Josh (02:57)

Love it. Love it. And hence, the reason you have a podcast.

Michelle & Rick (03:02)

Yeah, right. But all other veggies I'm good with. It's just not that one so much. Anyway, let's move on.

Josh (03:08)

No judgment zone here. And so to get to know both of you a little bit more, let's start with a little introduction of what's the inspiration behind you getting involved with Farm to School initiatives.

Michelle & Rick (03:24)

Okay, I was a school food service director for 30 years. 20 of the last 30 years was in Oregon. And it was just my thing to do what I did for fun after work every day. I got into it so much when the farm to school movement started happening about 15, 20 years ago. It was like I became a master gardener and I was that that food service director that wanted to get all the school garden produce into the cafeteria and get as much local produce into the cafeteria as possible. And I just I did that so much and then this job opened up at the state for me and it was like it was such a perfect fit. It was like the perfect dream job for me. So one day I just quit and did that. That was 12 years ago and I haven't looked back since. I get to do my fun stuff all day long and try to do what I did in my school district on a statewide level.

Josh (04:25)

Love it. Diving straight in. Love it. And what about you, Michelle?

Michelle & Rick (04:29)

And we've been together forever in our journey. So tell them how that happened. sure. I come to farm to school and school gardens. Well, I also was born in upstate New York, where you are residing now, Joshua. But my father's family, my father came to this country in the 1950s. so we really weren't rooted in any particular place and added to that. I couldn't read much in high school. I was dyslexic and now we know ADD. And so, you know, there was more like, whoa, back then there weren't all the kinds of supports there were. So I found my magic happy place digging in the earth. And it just kind of kept growing and growing. And graduating high school, I worked on farms and now we call them community supported agricultural programs I sold to schools, not because it was a program or a farm to school, but we had extra lettuce and carrots and onions after I was at farmer's markets. And so I would just show up at the back door of a school and be like, do you need produce? So that's kind of like some of the ways I got introduced to it. And then fast forward, I was probably 25 and I was working in the Bay Area School of Enterprise. was the first youth started high school in the country and they were doing a project and they ended up doing a project on school gardens and it was like, just like this amazing light bulb went on of like community, seeing how healthy everybody was together, just the humanness of it all. And it really inspired me to just like keep going and keep going and keep going. So that's the seeds of my engagement.

Josh (06:18)

Awesome, and you have green thumbs, apparently. do not. I'm not sure what the opposite of green is, but that's what my thumbs are. Yeah, right. Right. So let's talk about farm to school. And I guess we should probably start with the basic definition of what it is. We don't have to go too far into what it is. But let's say one sentence, two sentence snapshot. What is farm to school?

Michelle & Rick (06:26)

Aspiring green. Everyone's got a green thumb. Just looks different. In layman's terms, it's, we like to throw about this term called the three C's. The cafeteria, the classroom, and the community. So the cafeteria is, all where the local food should happen. The classroom is the school garden where you should learn about the schools. And the community is trying to get that message home to the parents. That's one of the reasons why we started our podcast is because we do a super good job at getting the first two C's out in our world, I think. know, farm to school has been a thing for 20 years, but when we bump into people and they go, what do you do for a living? I say, farm to school. And they say, farm to what? And then you say, know, school gardens and not everybody even knows that they go, have gardens in schools. So we do a good job in the school and in the classroom about it, but the community still doesn't know about it. And so we're trying to get that message out to the parents and caregivers

Josh (07:44)

So true, AKA storytelling. Tell the story of what their program is all about, including Farm to School. So I love that part of the three "C's" you talked about there. So in terms of Farm to School, it's not all easy. can't be easy street the whole way through. So what are some challenges when it comes to integrating and sustaining Farm to School initiatives? And how can some schools help combat some of those?

Michelle & Rick (08:12)

You Well, coming from my background as a food service director, you know, you have big schools, big school districts, mega school districts that serve hundreds of thousands of kids. And then you have tiny schools and rural schools like Oregon.

We look at it like we have all kinds of communities here. have, you know, most of the people live on the I -5 corridor on the west side where you have Portland, Salem, Eugene, big cities, bigger towns. And then we have Eastern Oregon, which is very remote. It's a high desert where little towns are scattered around. So that provides a lot of geographic lead that can be a challenge because

Not everybody can get local food in in places that aren't on the distribution list. So there's geographic issues. And then there's just like for food service directors being a farmer one myself, there's so many regulations and you're so busy and you're trying to meet the bottom line and to break even. And you have all these issues. Farm to school might not be. The first thing in your mind if you're not wired like Michelle or I. Like we're dyed in the wool, farm to school people, that's our thing. But it's not everyone's thing. So we have to try to convince them how advantageous it is to the kids in the

Josh (09:41)

So true. And collaboration might be one way that this can help with supporting it. And are there ways, are there examples that you have and how their collaboration can help with some of these challenges in pharmacy school and other challenges as well?

Michelle & Rick (09:56)

Yeah, that's a great question. No one person can do anything, right? We need each other and we're better together. So in Oregon, our story is that from my perspective, everyone has a different perspective, but this idea of local foods to schools, better foods to schools, fresher foods to schools, folks were doing it all around in different pockets. And at some point, you 2006 -ish, people were like, well, you we can only do so much. There's a lot of regulations, there's health costs. Maybe what we need is more funding to schools to buy local foods. So groups of folks got together and were like, hey, hey, state legislators, this is what schools need. Because just like Joshua, I've heard you say before, there's no one fix for all schools. But as a state, what we can do is work together to remove barriers and create opportunities. So that's exactly what we've done. Like fast forward 15 years and in Oregon, and this is actually, we were the first, but a lot have followed our steps since on a statewide level. We have positions in the Department of Agriculture who work to ready the supply, because there's always challenges and opportunities there. We also have someone in the Department of Education, like Rick here, who works to ready demand. And address issues related to procurement or timing or menuing or promotion and marketing. And then you have this like really robust network of community partners, our Oregon Farm to School Network, who does things like convenes, advocates, and also does a lot of communications. And then you have folks like me within the extension system.

And so we're a number of different programs. It's unusual on farm to school specialists. And I think we were the first faculty position in the state, in the country to be solely focused on farm to school. But people are doing farm to school everywhere in 4 -H, Master Gardener, SnapEd, Home Horticulture, Small Farms teams. it's a lot of just continually moving partnerships and collaborations that create just this incredible fabric of farm to school

Josh (12:16)

So true. It's not easy to navigate, especially when you're up against challenges. And I think that you have to take it on yourself is just going to make it that less motivating to push to it. So I love the word collaboration, as you know. And it's good to know that people should be looking at the resources that are available in their areas and their states to help with these initiatives. So in terms of school gardens, I know you're passionate about this school gardens. Not every school has a school garden. So where do you place the importance of having a school garden? Let's say on a scale of one to 10, I want both of you to answer this. Where do you place the importance of it with 10 being like it's super duper important? 11. Strong. Coming in strong.

Michelle & Rick (12:43)

I love school garden.

Yeah, turn it up to eleven

And it can be difficult. We were the first state to track all of our school gardens. Currently we have like 788 school gardens, over half in Oregon. Over half the schools in Oregon have gardens. Have a garden, thank you. Thank you for that. It's huge. But one thing we find is that... people mean well, and you might have a thriving, matter of fact, we have a couple of episodes on this, but we've had some school gardens that have been the best school gardens I've ever seen in the country. And when the person leaves, so does the garden sometimes, because it was a thing and not everyone is able to step in there, like we're all busy and some teachers might want to take that on or school garden coordinator. So I think, you our mission is like, it needs to be part of the curriculum. It needs to be part of the fabric of the schools where it's second nature. You can teach anything in the school, in the garden. And the magic happens when kids get their hands in the dirt and they're learning math, reading, physical education, anything, but they're learning it when they're getting outside, getting moving around. And

And it can happen. So I think one of the things is, you know, you know, it's so important, but it needs to be part of like the public school systems like we need to have paid school garden coordinators. That would be a huge

Josh (14:38)

couldn't agree more. And where do you place it on a scale of one to 10, Michelle?

Michelle & Rick (14:42)

Coming in very strong. you know, when you said importance, I was like, thinking of to whom and for what, right? You value things based on the goals that you have. I know you're a goal setter and a planner. And, you know, the reason that I'm passionate about school gardens, I often rarely talk about actually.

Josh (14:44)

and 12 coming in strong.

Great point.

Michelle & Rick (15:10)

You know, I talk about the academic achievement. I talk about kids, you know, maybe more bonded to school. Some we have increasingly evaluation for kids who will attend school more often if it's a school garden day or first tasting things. Like all these things that matter. problems go down. That's been well documented for different things. Social. Yeah, I mentioned that social cohesion goes up. There's also considerations related to healthy eating and lifelong active living. So you have your physical activity, have your food, create economic opportunities. Down the road for, you know, like youth entrepreneurship, we've seen a lot of different things. And then personally why it's so important to me is just that social emotional learning. Just the youth development component of, I told you at the beginning, like the light bulb that goes on when you get your hands in the soil and you have that experience

Nurturing another living thing. It's magical.

Josh (16:12)

Yeah, I think the only experience I had with that in grade school was the school giving us those little trees to go home and plant. But it wasn't like us actually planting any food for nourishment at all. So that wasn't a part of it. And I agree with you 100 % about having someone that is responsible for the garden that's more of a permanent.

You're in charge at the end of the day. Not saying they won't get support from students and faculty and staff and food service team, but just saying you need someone that is going to be in a position where it's like the thing. This is your focus because I've seen it at the college level where it's these gardens that start off and they're so great. And then it just tanks because that one person, all it takes is one, one person to leave that's passionate about it. And all of a sudden it's a thing of the past.

Michelle & Rick (17:06)

That's an important note to this is that like when I said we in Oregon were the first ones to map out where all of our gardens were, I brought that message to my compatriots around the country and now there's a dozen or so that know where all theirs are. But I never get rid of a garden even though the garden's not there, it's full of weeds, it's just ready to be plugged in, it's just in hiatus status.

It's there, we just need to find someone to plug it back in.

Josh (17:37)

Yeah, so true. And so on this podcast, I've had a master gardener come on, a master landscaper rather, and we talked about gardens. I've also had hydroponics a topic on here. Where's your stance on hydroponics?

Michelle & Rick (17:53)

Yeah, we were very fortunate to, like once people tackle school gardens, there's what's the next thing we could do. we've had a podcast about this, like raising chickens. That's a thing in a lot of school gardens you can get away with doing. And it teaches kids another level of animal husbandry and kind of caring for living things too. And then we had a master food preserver on the other day talking about what to do with your food if you have an overabundance, you can can it. And teach people those skills to do that at home safely. And then one of the next things is, okay, we've grown in rows and raised beds, but you know, here in Eastern Oregon, we have a growing season that's maybe a month long. It's really tiny because it's high desert and they get tons of snow. a lot of those places, like our school garden is in the cafeteria in a hydroponic system.

We've been lucky to have some people have a full -on aquaponics thing with the fish and the whole biosystem and aeroponics. I've seen that too. So there's lots of things you could do in that science stem realm that teaches you about good ways to do it. And the plus side is you're not going to get a lot of bugs, no weeds at all, no weeds. And whatever you plant, you're going to grow, and then you can transplant and do all sorts of things. So wonderful opportunities with that. Yeah, right.

Josh (19:22)

I raise my hand to know weeds.

Weeds are the worst for me.

Michelle & Rick (19:29)

about a lush landscape, know, farm to school or school gardens, it's just creating multiple opportunities for you to have positive experiences with food. And it's a good thing to know that a school garden isn't a one size fits all cookie cutter thing. It could be just like you said, it could be a classroom aquaponics or hydroponics thing, or it could be a windowsill garden, or it could be we have full five to 10 acre farms at a school with a barn that's funded by the school district. Not too many of them, but there's those that they do CSAs for their communities. It can be anything. It could be raised beds, row crops, orchards with fruit, critters, beef. bees. Yeah, exactly. So that's what's exciting about it. It could be anything.

Josh (20:20)

Yeah. Love

Yeah, so another episode that I had was actually with someone that specializes in fruit trees. And so he came on and we talked about fruit trees, which are apparently a lot easier typically than a full blown garden, or can be, I should say, depending on the type and how many.

Michelle & Rick (20:42)

can be. It's different. It depends on your skills. Well, and I've had some district administrators saying, you're just going to throw the apples at cars. We're not allowing them. you know, it's all about, you know, it's food. It's good. You can feed your kids. And we've had, I remember one district was locally here was going to take them out. And the food service director called me up and said, You know, like they had a deal where this nursery is a lot of times have root stock. They'll give you at the end of the season, like we have 50 trees. You want to plant them, you know, and and here the west side of Oregon, we don't really need to worry about watering them other than the summer. Like we don't get any rain in the summer for whatever reason, because of El Nino or whatever. But the rest of the time it rains all the time, drizzles. But the point is here, I told that food service director, I'm okay, how much is the case of apples cost these days? Figured out 35 bucks. Okay, how many bushels of apples does your tree and she said, like 200 bush, what's 200 times 35? That's what you're gonna have to supplement, you like you're gonna have to buy those apples. So they went to the school board and she said, it's gonna cost us $4 ,000 a year. Just, okay, nevermind, we'll leave them, they said. So it's a money talk

Yes, it does. Yes, it does. Unfortunately, that's the road we have to go down sometimes is speaking the finance language. So, school has come a long ways over the years. Again, I haven't been full blown in child nutrition, but I've known about it for some time and I've been watching it from a distance and it's only going.And more and more better improvements in so many ways, where do you envision Farm to School? Like, what's your envision for the future of it and what changes would you like to

We don't have to agree. What you think? Well, I think we're constantly trying to figure out that problem. It's a thing now. We're trying to get it to be a household word, but how do we make it sustainable? So that's the part we're trying to struggle with. We want to keep it there and self -sustaining and have school districts realize that it can be a part of the school, just like math or

Josh (22:49)

Yeah, you don't have to agree.

Michelle & Rick (23:17)

or athletics or anything else. It's a vital part of the school. And the other thing would be, I would say a call to action maybe, like parents, like if it means a lot to you, we have this wonderful thing called a school board meeting. And across the country, they're all the same. They give anybody two minutes to talk. They'll start a timer. And just to let them know local food is a concern to you when you'd love your programs to have more local food and you would love a school garden program at your school. How can we do that? And just those little seeds have they help so much. I've seen that happen where the school board goes out. It is a really good idea and invite them. Invite your school board members to. I know you talked about where is it going and I went I kind of I kind of commandeered this to go like a call to action, but yeah, it's just a good avenue to get know, to get your school board folks know that it's

Josh (24:13)

No, I love

Yeah, and I'm going to definitely take note of that. That's a very, very good point. Michelle, do you have anything to that?

Michelle & Rick (24:26)

Yeah, sure. You said, where do you envision it going? And I think of, when people think of local foods or farm to school, my sense is it's less about distance as in local and more about this sense of like deliciousness. It's intact grains, it's greens, it's things that you actually wanna sit down and eat.

And it's more about the relationship people have with the food and the people who produce the food and the earth from where we get food from. So I think the future is really going in that direction and what it exactly looks like. I'm not entirely sure, but more like universal school meals, more scratch cooking where people have the time to prepare and eat the ingredients.

The integration of agriculture and food and environmental education into our other educational curricula, core curricula and others, so that it's not the separate thing or this add -on thing we're trying to do. We just realized that it actually provides a really beautiful, delicious, nutritious systems approach to accomplish a lot of our other goals.

Josh (25:49)

Yeah, that's very good, well said. And I think that you just gave me an idea for an engagement opportunity with not only your students, but even your staff, but bring in some local products and do a little taste test. Let's see if they can figure out which one is local, which one isn't, because I'm willing to bet, like, I don't know about you, but 10 times out of 10, in my experience, the local is always better. So that's another idea to throw out there.

Michelle & Rick (26:01)

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Josh (26:16)

Again, I want to thank both of you for taking the time to come on. And before we take this out, where can people connect to get to know you if they have any new questions to ask you, if they want to listen to your podcast? Where can people go to connect with

Michelle & Rick (26:32)

You can search, just Google up OSU Farm to School and you'll find our Farm to School podcast. And then you'll also find Oregon State University's Farm to School website. And then where are you located? Yeah, I'm with the Department of Education Farm to School. So if you put Oregon Department of Education Farm to School, we have a very, very, very robust website with resources that don't, that really, that really apply to the rest of the country. You know, if they wanted to have resources, that's a good place too. But yeah, what Michelle said, Farm to School Podcast OSU will get us to our home site where we have all of our show notes and stuff. we're on, if you just Google Farm to School Podcast, we're on 40 platforms or whatever too. yeah, it's easy to find

Josh (27:23)

I highly, highly recommend audience that you check that podcast out. So much great value that I've gotten from it. So I know that you will too. And Michelle, Rick, I think of both of you as I do everyone involved in school food service as remarkable academic food ambassadors. It's not about my brand. It's about the work that you're doing and helping bring nutritious food to our students every day in one way, or form. thank you. Thank you audience again for tuning in. And until next time, I'm your host signing off.