Farm To School Research Paper

For my group’s PAEP we decided to look into farm to school. Farm to school is a great program that encourages schools to actively cooperate with local businesses to provide fresh, local, and healthy food to students. Farm to school is a network of helpful funding and resources that helps schools by operating on three principals. Those being procurement, education, and school gardens. The first and largest aspect of farm to school is procurement. This means that the farm to school network helps local schools get in touch with local farms and businesses to set up deals for purchasing local produce. This is the largest and most well-known part of farm to school, after all its basically its name. However, farm to school also focuses heavily on …show more content…
Sometimes the old ways of doing things are still the best. Farm to school does not require any fancy technology, rather it operates on the simple principal of community building and equality. Farm to school encourages local schools to contact local farmers and producers to work out contracts together, rather than pulling in outside help. This goes back to a time when everyone worked together and helped those in need. Another strong principle of farm to school is providing fresh healthy food to everyone, after all isn’t that a basic human right. Farm to school is a nationwide network and support center so as such they do utilize some technology. Farm to school using the internet and news sources to get the word out so that they can get more supportive legislation passed and obtain more funding to help get more schools involved. The core concept of farm to school is basic and goes back decades, while somewhat primitive the concept works and more people continue to join …show more content…
Farm to school supports the environment, local community, and helps to raise informed and healthy students. The network provides support for the environment by reducing the total emissions caused by the large distances that food is transported around this country. Food is often transported from one side of the country to the other, usually in large fuel consuming refrigerated trucks. Farm to school helps to cut down on overall emissions by reducing total distance food is transported. For example, a local Burlington school gets its beef from just outside the city. “The Burlington School Food Project has recently contracted with Vermont farmers to raise local beef that will be slaughter and processed within 15 miles of the city” (Camp). Farm to school also supports the growth of community by encouraging schools and local farms to work together to come to an agreement regarding contracts. In general farm to school only provides the resources and sometimes extra funding, it is up to the farmers and school officials to create deals. While healthy local food can sometimes be pricy it is worth the cost to support local businesses and grow the local company rather than support some fortune 500 company that is awful towards their employees. The final way that farm to school is ethically sound is that they support education of children through healthy food and other resources. Hardly anything is more ethically