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When we're able to obtain a grant like the Farm to School grant from the USDA,
that helps us to take it to the next level.
Here at Royalton-Hartland, the Farm to School initiative is pre-k through grade
12. We want those students to grow and learn the concepts of agricultural
education and farm to school from their first times in elementary school all the
way up to the year that they graduate. Our schools are sending kids to farms on
a field trip. It's really education outside of the box and everyone could
use that. They'll be able to see milking cows,
potentially even a calf being born, these kind of things that they just don't get
to see every day. I think the most interesting part is when we went into
the parlor, because we, like learned it in class and stuff
and I think it was just really cool seeing it in the real world.
The average age of a farmer is around 60 years old and so if we don't start to
educate the younger generation who are going to be your future farmers your
caretakers and your stewards of the community? And we live in a rural
community and I think a lot of us would like to keep it that way.
I was really excited that our meat was going to be served at
my own cafeteria, the school I go to, the school he goes to, the school she teaches
at. We were born and raised here in our ag community so it's very near and dear
to us and we're just delighted that this is taking place.
We're creating career pathways for our students
specific to agriculture. It's an offering that they don't
necessarily get in another school district and we're
hoping to be the leaders on this. Yep, I want to have my own like little hobby
farm homestead if you can call it that
where i raise my own animals and everything.
Oh, we want to, pun intended, we want to plant the seed.
I think it starts here. I think we need to get back to our roots,
pun intended again. (laugh)
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The Royalton-Hartland central school district is primarily agricultural.
We have a middle class, working population of parents.
We have two different towns, the town of Royalton and the town of Hartland,
several little hamlets and villages throughout the area.
We have about 1200 students. We employ about 230 people in our school district.
So we consider ourselves a small, rural community
where everyone cares about each other. We all care about the success of these
young people, we help them to learn, we help them to grow up to be really
responsible citizens for our country. Our school district had the vision
about four years ago for creating a kindergarten through 12th grade
agricultural education program. There's an agricultural science
component, there is an animal science component and
then there's a food science component. So why did Farm to School fit? Because we
knew that this was a way we could get all students involved, whether that's our
students in the high school analyzing the fat content of a cheeseburger or
elementary students planting,
taking care of over the summer and then harvesting the vegetables at the end of
the season. The Department of Agriculture Farm to
School program provided us with a set of resources that
helped us in multiple ways. One, it allowed us to purchase some
equipment that was much needed in our food service
program. The second part of it was for us to
partner with our Cornell Cooperative Extension service to be able to provide
Farm to School activities. And they helped us to develop curriculum,
they were able to provide training for our teachers, they were able to provide
us ready-to-go lesson plans that we could infuse in our schools,
and it also provided us with the resources to
compensate - that's a nominal compensation - but the champions at each of the
buildings. Really good ideas from the
superintendents go nowhere if you, if it's the superintendent's idea only. ... if
you're cutting up you've got some pipettes... When you've got the buy-in of
your teachers to be able to put the extra effort and
to put the extra time, to stay after hours and to generate
enthusiasm amongst their peers, that's when new initiatives take off.
Here at Royalton-Hartland, I am the high school agriculture instructor and I am
also the district coordinator for our Royalton-Hartland Farm to School project.
The students really like to learn by doing and that is what agricultural
education is - taking what they're learning in the classroom and actually
applying it to the real world. And it is all surrounding food production, making
informed choices and understanding. And that's not just at the high school level,
this is happening at the elementary level through raised bed gardens, through
butterfly gardens and pollinators, through worm composting and
creating and using the products that they create right at school. And they
might make a salsa or they might make french fries in the classroom, which is
an awesome thing, and that transcends into our middle school program as well
as our high school program. [Music]
I had a group of students that prepared apple crisp, and the apples were sourced
all from local sources within our school district.
These students are going to take those skills home and they're going to assist
their families, they're going to teach their families about things that they
have learned and they're going to become more informed themselves.
Every single year I have students that are leaving Royalton-Hartland and are
moving into careers in the agriculture industry. I have students that I know
firsthand that are working in local farms and in production agriculture. I
also know students firsthand that are in college right now. I have a recent
graduate that's in college to become an agricultural educator based on the
experiences that they had as a student here at Royalton-Hartland. And I know
students that are working in the ag industry and pursuing degrees in
agriculture. [Music]
The entire program is fun to me. In high school I've taken two of our
agri-science programs: agriculture science and animal science,
which I'm currently in. The animal science program is phenomenal. I love
working with the animals and learning the
anatomy and everything because i want to eventually have cows whenever
i grow up and get my own farm started.
I'm definitely going to take food science next so I can learn how to cook
because i don't know how to cook very well. So that class will show me how to
do other things as well. [Music]
Anything that our business can do to promote agriculture
and especially in youngsters is something that we want to be a part of.
So in whatever way we can do that we're excited to do so. I have young kids,
I have an eight, a six and a four year old and I want them to to know and
understand agriculture and to embrace it and to learn as much as they can about
it. So I love that that our own school district is participating in this
program. [Music]
We're excited we have a field trip from the Royalton-Hartland class coming to
our facilities to be able to tour and learn about what we do every day. The
animal would come in and turn sideways and then you would be
milking through the back between their hind legs...
It was really cool to see everything that they have to do to milk
the cows and produce the milk that we drink every day. My favorite part had to
have been when we were talking about the different feeds because it translated
what we learned in class into an actual real life, hands-on experience.
Now, temperature of the bulk tank - what do you think the milk has to be cooled at?
140. 140? What is it reading right now?
39. Milk is 87 percent water... The benefits for the students to be able to understand
how their food is produced and where it's produced and how sustainable our
agricultural production is, to be able to see
possible pathways for careers within agriculture,
one of the things I hear from people that work in agriculture all the time is,
they're worried about the next generation
being there to do these jobs on the farms and to be able to produce the food
that we need, both for this country and for the world.
And our students, with their experiences, they're seeing that connection.
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I'm the Food Service Director for Royalton-Hartland central schools, so I
manage the cafeterias. Cornell Cooperative Extension met with
us and said, how can we help you make this Farm to School easier
to get more local food into the schools? It was pivotal because of, what they did
is they connected the farm, the school and the vendor
where we purchase our items from. And so they made it so that the vendor
themselves worked with the farms, and we could have that one contact of
the vendor, and the vendor would go to the farms and buy the product that we
wanted, and you can pick what farm it comes from, and the vendor will go to the
farm and buy the product and bring it to the school. So we have an amazing
coordination going on. Julie Fuerch, our Food Service Director,
approached us and asked us if we'd be interested in providing beef for a New
York farm day that, when they were providing food from local farmers or
producers at the high school. And we were very excited to do so. Our daughter is a
senior at the high school. We thought it was very, um you know, an honor to have
the food that she helps produce served to her classmates. I just thought it was
awesome because I've ran almost all the equipment that
helped prepare the crops and harvested the
crops that we feed to the cows that we feed to the people and I just thought
that was amazing. And as for the classes, I have been in almost all of Mr.
Sweeney's classes, from 9th grade to 12th grade,
and he is hands-down, like one of the best teachers I have
ever had. He is amazing with all of his students and it's really important that
people know where their food comes from, how it's made, where it's made, the hard
work that gets put into it and every little thing that goes into it. And all
of his classes have some way of providing that information to kids who
wouldn't know otherwise. I was astounded at the disconnect that children had with
food. They would eat a chicken nugget all day
long, but they didn't understand the concept
that, that was a chicken that walked around and was a live creature. There was
a disconnect with their food. And this educational process that, that
the USDA with Farm to School has has promoted this education
of younger children growing up with this education of where their food comes from
has lessened that disconnect. I've seen it. ...the farmer plants the seed... They, they
know where their food comes from now. ..hi ho the derry-o, the farmer plants the seed.
[Music]
My name is Jessica Monaco and I'm a fourth grade teacher here at Royalton-
Hartland elementary school. I've been teaching here for 22 years, and along
with Susan McLaughlin we're trying to spearhead and have a farm to school
initiative here at our school. We have a lot of plans. We want to start a green
team, students that are really interested in
agriculture that they can take care and maintain of with everything that we're
implementing. ...Okay, we are going to plant potatoes in
this bed and just do a nice light line... So what we saw today started a long time
ago. I've always had a worm compost in my
classroom, so the kids are allowed to take their healthy snack and put it in
the worm compost to build nice compost for our garden bed. In the beginning of
the year they harvested potatoes from our last year's class that they planted
with the compost worms from last year, and we harvested the potatoes,
we washed them, we cut them, we prepared them in a soup and then we also made
French fries out of them. And they were amazed that that's where French fries
come from. And that goes hand-in-hand with our pollinator garden. So, you know,
not only do we have the perennial plants in there and growing but they, you know,
they've got the butterflies to see that whole life cycle, too. We've got the
life cycle of the plant but then you have those, the life cycle of the
butterfly and then they're going and releasing them in the hopes that they'll
do that job of pollination somewhere around our community and our school.
So I'm passionate about this because it, I just see the kids come alive
outside. I come alive outside. Getting our hands dirty, actually touching the soil,
actually feeling the breeze, looking at the trees and identifying them and
understanding where everything comes from. So I think it's something kids, I
think, are naturally passionate about as well. So it's kind of - energy produces
energy. It's been fun, it's been hard work but
there are so many people that are dedicated to it and that really see the
importance of it that I hope it continues for a long time.
What we're finding right now is that the students that are engaged in this grant
right now and the teachers, they're not just learning
food science, they're learning about all kinds of
scientific applications. They're having to present
and use their communication skills, they're using higher end mathematics,
they're applying all of the content that they're learning in their classes
through agriculture. And it's incredibly powerful.
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Part of our efforts here in town has been to generate what's referred to as
the Royalton-Hartland Ag Foundation and these are a group of local business
people and farmers, that's a 501c3, it's completely separate from the school
district, and their sole purpose is to raise money to give back to the schools
and to support the students. They've helped to sponsor students to go
to national competitions, they helped to sponsor an effort that
the FFA wanted to do, to "thank a farmer day," so to provide resources. They helped
us to put in, purchase an agricultural shed to support the supplies at the
elementary school as part of their outdoor learning lab. It's pretty
exciting
If anyone's looking to take on a Farm to School initiative,
there's a couple of key components. You need to make certain that you have the
support of your governance board, your school board and
that you have administration that's going to support that. You need to be
thinking about having champions to make sure that it's implemented and you need
to make certain that it's exciting for young people.
We know when we do a really good quality Farm to School program
students grow through the nutrition,
they grow through the application, they get engaged, they get excited and their
learning will improve. Farm to School is not a standalone
initiative for a community. It should be embedded in everything that we do.
So, and I also, I want to thank the USDA. That these opportunities and these
grants that they distribute across the country
help little communities like the Royalton-Hartland central schools to
achieve great things.
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