Tucker County High School students and staff finished
building a greenhouse and an additional research classroom for the high school
in April. It was built with a $91,000 grant from National Forest
Foundation. At 3,500 feet, the greenhouse is one of the highest on the east
coast.
“We’re standing in front of the school greenhouse and
greenhouse classroom/research laboratory. I think the neat thing here is that
we used student labor as much as we could in building these structures. We feel
we’ve got a nice facility here to be the foundation for the Farm to School
initiative,” says dairy farmer Terry Hauser, the Agriculture Science teacher at
the high school.
“The greenhouse will mainly be used to start plants in as
well as house our hydroponics lettuce that will provide lettuce for the school
cafeteria,” Hauser says. “The bedding plants, the vegetable plants that we’re
producing will be available for students to take back to their home vegetable
plots that we hope will provide produce for the farmers’ markets and also the
school.”
Hauser says, with lots of state support, the push is to get
kids interested in the entrepreneurial side of agriculture. Inside the 32 by 72
foot polycarbonate greenhouse, which has a radiant heat concrete floor, Hauser shows off the lettuce and tomatoes.
“Each one of my students has been assigned a tomato, they’ve
adopted a tomato. Some of them have given them nicknames. But they are
responsible for fertilization of the tomatoes and I use some of my special ed
students to come out and water the them. That’s something they can do that’s
regular. So they’ll be out here fifth period, doing that.”
The lettuce here is grown in a hydroponics system.
“This is a lettuce that we will have the ability to harvest
as a root ball,” Hauser says. “We can market it with the roots on it. That will
provide freshness if we want to go to the farmers’ market. Here at the school,
we’ll probably just cut the roots off and take it right to the cafeteria. This
is really neat because there’s no inventory problem. As long as we’re producing
we can feed the cafeteria on an as-need basis.”
Hauser explains that providing fresh lettuce and tomatoes to
the school cafeteria salad bar is just one initiative in the county to provide
healthier food, and agriculture education to students.
“Our push is entrepreneurship and that we get the kids
involved in growing this stuff, but then we need to take it a step further and
ProStart comes in,” Hauser says. “How do we store and preserve these foods to
be used all year long? I think that’s where we’ve evolved to at this point.”
“We actually had kids in our class canning,” says chef Brian
Covell who teaches the ProStart program at Tucker County High. “They learned
how to do the whole canning process that way if they ever want to do spaghetti sauce
or things like that, they know how to do that.”
There are about 52 ProStart programs operating in West
Virginia with an annual enrollment of more than 1,300 high school students.
Covell has a classroom as well as a fully equipped food service kitchen where
students learn about the many facets of the restaurant and food service
industry.
“The kids learn from the basics,” Covell says. “We learn how
to make bread, we made dough, we make pepperoni rolls, stuff like that. So they
actually get to learn how to make everything from scratch.”
Covell says students who are interested in the food industry
get a head start in learning about everything from sanitary practices to career
options. He also hopes they will soon be growing fresh herbs for his class in the
greenhouse in addition to fresh vegetables so that they can learn the
differences between what they can grow and what they can find at a supermarket.
Meanwhile back at the cafeteria, head cook Cindy Snyder is
enthusiastic about the changes she’s seeing in the kitchen.
“It started in the fall, or in the winter when Mr. Hauser
and Mr. Eckel got the greenhouse up and running,” Snyder says. “And then they
started with the small things. First lettuce and tomatoes, and then it’s just
gotten larger and larger.”
“We’ve met with other farmers in the communities and in the
surrounding areas and they’re starting to bring me fresh vegetables and fresh
fruits. We’ve got orchards for apples and now we have all the tomatoes and
green beans and peppers and cucumbers and everything that they can supply us
with. And it’s been great, the kids are really buying into it.”
Snyder says that while it often means more prep work for her
and her staff, as a mother, it’s rewarding to see the kids eating and learning
about fresh produce. She’s seen the most enthusiastic consumption from the
student body when fellow students bring produce in that they’ve grown
themselves.
Bekki Leigh is a coordinator with the Department of
Education’s Office of Child Nutrition. She partners with farmers, chefs, and
extension agents to spread information about Farm to School efforts throughout
the state. She says as the movement grows, so does the potential for economic
growth in agribusiness.
“Mason County had featured a day of locally produced items
on their lunch menu—just for a single day, one day of lunch,” Leigh says. “The
economic impact that generated just that one day for one meal was over ten
thousand dollars. So the market is there. It’s a matter of getting producers to
supply that market.”
Leigh says the need is great and many times, farmers can
contact a local extension agent to be connected to schools.