Farm Collectives Cultivate Ties to School Lunch Plans

The Rodriguez brothers were ready to call it quits. After a quarter century of farming, the Oxnard strawberry growers couldn’t manage to turn a buck anymore between soaring costs and sinking prices.

Then they went back to school.

Joining a group of more than 30 Southern California growers, Antonio and Reynaldo Rodriguez last year began selling a share of their sweet harvest to school districts eager to enrich cafeteria offerings with fresh fruits and greens.

Through the Gold Coast Growers’ Collaborative, their berries now are consumed in lunchrooms from the upper-crust private schools of Ojai to the urban campuses of Compton. And the additional income -- more than $10,000 so far -- has helped the brothers stay in business another season.

“I don’t know if we would have made it otherwise,” said Antonio Rodriguez, 50, who farms 24 acres and sells primarily at farmers markets. The rapid expansion of strawberry acreage on the Oxnard Plain has flooded those markets and his bottom line.

“This has solved many problems for our business,” he said. “And it’s good for the schools too.”

Seeking to boost student nutrition and battle childhood obesity, schools across the country are increasingly turning to small farmers to stock cafeterias with fresh-from-the-field produce. More than 400 school districts in 22 states have launched farm-to-school programs, setting up salad bars, farm tours and nutrition education classes designed to foster a lifetime of healthy eating.

The push also has been a boon to small farmers such as the Rodriguez brothers, at a time when many are being squeezed by rising costs and global competition.

The Gold Coast collaborative is among the first in California to seize collectively on the farm-to-school niche.

Tapping growers in Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Kern counties, the group began stocking salad bars in the Ventura Unified School District two years ago. During the last school year, it provided produce, including Asian pears and sweet carrots, on a weekly basis to more than 50 schools, generating nearly $200,000 in sales. Next year, schools in Oxnard and Port Hueneme are set to join.

“It’s really taking off,” said Judy Blue, who coordinates sales and deliveries for the collaborative. “For some of these guys, it has made all the difference.”

The collaborative eliminates a major barrier in establishing farm-to-school programs. Many school food buyers prefer the simplicity of purchasing from a single distributor rather than multiple growers, each of whom would require a separate order form, billing invoice and delivery schedule.

Marion Kalb, director of the Davis-based National Farm-to-School Program, said she knows of only a handful of cooperatives dedicated to delivering crops to campuses.

“On the farm side, probably the biggest hurdle is how to get the produce from the field to the school,” Kalb said, adding that she thinks farmers cooperatives “are the wave of the future.”

Tracie Thomas doesn’t know what she would have done without the collaborative.

As assistant food service director for the Compton Unified School District, Thomas set out a year and a half ago to install salad bars in the district’s 35 schools.

She had done the same in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, which established one of the nation’s first farm-to-school programs. Of course, it was easier in Santa Monica: To procure produce, food service workers could turn to a number of farmers markets in that city.

The farmers market nearest to Compton is miles away, Thomas said. When a distributor seeking to introduce Gold Coast produce to Los Angeles-area schools approached her, she eagerly signed up.

Last school year, the collaborative provided enough produce to allow salad bars to operate five days a week in all 24 of the district’s elementary schools. For the coming school year, healthful lunches will be available at the middle schools and high schools as well.

“If I didn’t have the Gold Coast growers, I don’t know if I would have been able to do it,” Thomas said. “And what better source than schools to support struggling farmers?”

More support could be on the way. Assemblyman Pedro Nava (D-Santa Barbara) has introduced a bill aimed at expanding farm-to-school programs in California. Already a leader in the farm-to-school movement, California has about 250 schools in 25 districts that provide farm-direct lunch food.

Nava’s bill, AB 826, would provide workshops for school personnel on incorporating local crops into cafeteria menus. It also aims to encourage farmers to participate in farm-to-school programs. The bill has cleared the Assembly and is winding through the Senate.

“We want to place a particular emphasis on small farmers,” Nava said, “those people who have been part of our communities for a very long time and who now need additional markets for their fresh fruits and vegetables.”

It was in that spirit that the Gold Coast collaborative was born. Ojai citrus grower Jim Churchill, who had been instrumental in launching a salad-bar program in Ventura schools, called growers together in the summer of 2003 to gauge interest in forming a collective.

“To a great extent, farmers are people who went into farming because they didn’t want to talk to people; they are not necessarily marketers,” Churchill said. “We wanted to see if we could overcome the institutional barriers that prevent schools from buying from growers and growers from selling to schools.”

It appears that they have. In Ventura, the collaborative stocks salad bars in all 17 elementary schools, two middle schools and two high schools.

It supplies school salad bars in tiny Ojai and sprawling Thousand Oaks. Gold Coast produce finds its way into schools as far north as Goleta and as far south as Hawthorne.

And the way Santa Paula citrus grower Robin Smith sees it, there’s no end in sight.

“I think for us small guys, this kind of thing is going to be more and more important,” said Smith, whose 60-acre Mud Creek Ranch supplies apples and oranges to schools through the collaborative.

“The potential is unlimited,” she said. “I think there are enough small farms in Southern California that we could supply all of the schools.”