Farm to school program helps cafeterias reap local bounty

Boquet Valley students know where their cafeteria food comes from, because they had a hand in growing it.

Last year, Boquet Valley third-, fourth- and fifth-graders helped plant a school garden so they could harvest fresh herbs and vegetables for the school’s pesto pasta, coleslaw, and pumpkin crunch. This year, the students and their families helped establish a chicken flock, so the district’s food service team can bring in a steady supply of fresh eggs for baking and breakfast.

The garden and chickens are part of Boquet Valley’s ongoing commitment to local foods; the district sources 31 percent of its ingredients from local farms.

“We always source a farm first,” said Sasha Pulsifer, cook for Boquet Valley Central School District and member of the Boquet Valley Support Staff Association, who heads up the garden project.

“The reasons for this are twofold. For one, it tastes better. It's fresher. It's usually more nutrient-dense because it was picked a few days ago, not shipped across the country,” said Pulsifer. “It's also important because some of the kids’ parents work on these farms, so it's really awesome when you have a kid come through the lunch line and be like, ‘Are these from my farm?’ and we’ll say, ‘Yep, they sure are.’”

Every day, Pulsifer and her team turn the local bounty into nourishing meals in their two scratch-cooking cafeterias, with rotating menus that include appetizing options like yogurt with homemade granola, freshly baked muffins, locally raised burgers and sausage, and a daily salad bar.

“We have lots of kids who will come in for seconds, and that always makes you feel good because you know that it is actually something that we made, and we made it from local healthy ingredients, and they are loving it,” said Pulsifer.

Boquet Valley is one of Champlain Valley Educational Services BOCES’s nine component districts participating in the New York State Farm to School Program and the 30% NYS Initiative, a local food incentive that increases lunch reimbursements from 5.9 cents to 25 cents for districts that source at least 30 percent of their ingredients from New York farms and producers.

The biggest reason to make the switch from global food systems to local is, of course, student health.

“The closer in proximity, the more nutrition stays in the product,” said Julie Holbrook, Shared Food Services Director for Champlain Valley Educational Services, who manages the food programs for the nine participating districts. “The closer from the field to your stomach you get, the more nutrition you're going to get.”

To find vendors, districts use the NY Food Product Database, an inventory of local farms and products. The list is created and maintained by Cornell Cooperative Extension - Harvest NY, with input from departments of Agriculture and Markets and Education.

The database contains everything from apples to yogurt, along with contact information for providers.

But participating districts can also forge their own relationships with local farms and funnel those relationships back to the database.

That’s what Zach Zarling does.

Zarling is the School Lunch Manager at Peru Central School District, which sources 36 percent of its food locally, including beef, cheese, yogurt, maple syrup and apples.

“I had multiple people come up to me at the Farm to School Summit this year and ask, ‘How do you start that? How do you get more local food in?’” Zarling recalls. “I said, ‘Do you know the farmers in the area?’ No? Well, there you go. Go talk to your farmers.’”

Zarling said negotiating deals with small farms and coordinating deliveries from multiple vendors can be more complicated than ordering from a single-source vendor like Sysco or US foods, but it’s ultimately more rewarding for him and his staff.

“They take pride in the fact that they're feeding students whole food, food that they know where it comes from,” said Zarling.

Stabilizing family farms stabilizes the community, too, preserving jobs and protecting property values.

“This gives farmers a guaranteed buyer for their crop, to help keep them afloat, and maybe even help some of them grow,” said Zarling.

Of course, participating in the state’s farm to school program isn’t without its share of hurdles.

In 2025, a state comptroller audit found the 30% initiative is underutilized because of the undue administrative burden it places on districts. In the 2024-25 school year, just 73 out of nearly 762 eligible school food authorities outside New York City participated in the program, and of those districts, 68 percent were part of a BOCES shared food service contract.

To improve district access, the comptroller recommended reducing the administrative burden, streamlining documentation requirements, and doing more to connect schools with eligible farms and farm products.

Holbrook admits that participating in the 30% program is a lot of work. Districts have to isolate food purchased for lunch from food purchased for other meals and then track and document all NYS items, and that can be hard for cafeterias with a smaller staff or less administrative know-how, Holbrook said. Even with record-keeping help from Cornell Cooperative Extension, the paperwork is onerous, Holbrook said.

“It is still burdensome,” said Holbrook. “Literally, we have someone who's full time almost the whole year who's entering data for this,” Holbrook said.

In 2025, districts left an estimated $7 million on the table due to lack of participation in this program, prompting New York State Legislative Agriculture Chairs, Senator Michelle Hinchey and Assemblymember Donna Lupardo to call for the modernization of the program. Their proposal, which would change the eligibility calculation to include all school meals and increase the reimbursement rate, is supported by NYSUT.

NYSUT continues to champion school nutrition as a key element of student success. In 2025, thanks to the advocacy of NYSUT and other coalition partners, the state expanded its school meal program to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students regardless of income level.

“Every educator knows a child can’t focus on learning if they’re hungry or undernourished. Farm to School is a commonsense way to change that by bringing fresh, locally grown food into our cafeterias while supporting New York farmers and local economies,” said NYSUT President Melinda Person of the proposal to improve the 30% NYS Initiative. “NYSUT strongly supports modernizing this program so more districts can take advantage of it and more students can benefit.”