 My name is KB Paul. I'm going to be the moderator of this session this morning. I work for Lincoln University Cooperative Extension. I'm a state extension specialist. And as I said, I'm also co-coordinator for the SAR program. Today, we have as speaker, Mr. Garrett Greider. He's going to talk to us a real education lesson learned from Farm to School program. Thank you, appreciate it. Take this out, I think. Yes, my name is Garrett Greider. I am a recent graduate from Truman State University. Truman State University is a liberal arts college in Kirksville, Missouri, so the Northeast Missouri region. And actually, what I'm about to talk about is a Farm to School program. It was, its origins started back in 2011. Of course, before that, a couple years, they had started a sustainability initiative at Truman. So within that, they had formed a committee. Within that sustainability initiative, they wanted to, one of the big things they wanted to get into the college program was local foods. So we had access to us, a university farm, 400 acres, and we had, we have cattle, a lot of livestock out there, and plenty of fields for growing crops. So we thought, you know, we can do this out here. So the agriculture department there kind of took on the project for the local foods demand we had there. And also within that sustainability initiative, we also do biodiesel from waste vegetable oil from the cafeterias. We also have a composting project where food scraps from the cafeterias are taken back out to the university farm and we have a compost, an area designated for composting. And within just, it wasn't just, it's a collaborative effort of the whole campus, really. So it wasn't just the ag department. We have some, I have some other organizations listed there, ECO, which is the Environmental Campus Organization. They're very active on campus. And the rot riders, they take care of the compost and truck it out to the farm every day. So they're great to have. Move on. We received the USDA grant in 2011 by the department chair, Michael Cyple of the ag department. He wrote this. At the time, I was still a student, actually. I got my degree in ag business. And then once we got the grant, we began to plan for what we needed to produce fruits and vegetables. That's what it specifically was for. We had five and a half acres total of fruit and vegetable production. So that's, I mean, that's quite a lot to manage. So to be able to manage those fields, we decided we needed a position and that position we decided to call local foods coordinator. So that position was responsible for mostly the operations. That's my current position. At the time when this program was established, I was still a student, like I said. So we had a different one. But the local foods coordinator is in charge of all the operations. So that's, basically, you're out there. It's all hands on. You're doing everything from the growing of the crops, starting them indoors. You have to learn, have to use how the tractors, how to hook up the implements. Some of the implements that we felt very useful for our production was, of course, a rotary tiller. That's pretty standard. Prepares a fine seed bed real quickly. Then also from Morgan County Seed Company, which is actually here today, was where we purchased a lot of this stuff. We have a plastic mulch layer. That was the hold down. I'm sure you all have seen this before, but suppress the weeds, holds the moisture, and we lay drip irrigation under it, which came in really handy this year with the drought. It pretty much saved us and it was okay. It worked out. Like I like to say, with the drought, you can always add water to the soil, but you can't take it away. So I'd rather have a drought than an excessive rainy season. We also had a Holland Transplanner. If anyone's seen those, it's a hooks to the three point hitch of a tractor, and you have one person that sits in the back, and it's got a carousel, and these goes around like this, and you just drop transplants that you've planted into flats. Once those are ready to go out in the field, you just, you have someone that sits, there's a tray that lines up, and you set your flat on that with your transplants in it. And as you're going down your row, this carousel's spinning, and you just drop those transplants down in there. Then the Holland Transplanner company, I believe is out of Michigan or Minnesota, but it's a cost effective implement, and well worth the, if you're doing larger scale production like we were five and a half acres for fruits and vegetables a lot, so that's something that came in really handy, and didn't have to do everything by hand, which would've been very difficult. We also had a Waterwheel Planner, which we got from Morgan County Seed Company, and that's actually for transplanting through black plastic. Once you have that black plastic mulch laid down, it will punch holes, depending on what your spacing is, and you can put in, we used it mostly for tomatoes and peppers, and some cabbages too is what we did on plastic, and some other equipment listed there. And then we also, within grant funding, we were able to set up a processing kitchen there at Truman. So we have a full functioning processing kitchen, which has oven and range with canning supplies. We do canning, we teach that at the university. Also have a dehydrator, which we use a lot for tomatoes, commercial walking coolers to keep our stuff fresh, and so we can, when we're selling it to the cafeterias and whatnot, then some other things there. This is, I just wanted to show you some pictures of what our equipment looks like. The one in the top left, that's the plastic mulch layer. I actually saw one over there at this exhibit. It's, like I said, it's real quick and effective. You see us down there utilizing it. You just need one person on the tractor, then you need two people on the back to run it. You just, once it's lifted up, you got your ground rototill there. You're gonna, both of us in the back there will bend down, hold it under the wheels. He'll let down the implement, and he'll continue to go down the row. And it has wheels that pack it into the dirt and throw dirt on the side, so it makes it real firm. There in the middle there is that, that's the water wheel planter. And here in the bottom, you can see it loaded up with, looks like there's melons there, water melons, transplants that we planted on black plastic. So it's gonna punch a hole every so and it's gonna fill that hole with water, get it real moist. And then you're just, as you're going down, you're in a low gear. And there's two, actually there's two seats back there. So you have someone on each side just plugging those into the black plastic once it punches a hole. Real easy. This was the second year for our production. The first year we did not have this water wheel planter. So everything that was planted on plastic, we had to take a tomato stake, jab a hole, and then put it in by hand. So that took what is usually a week's job down to a day's job. So planting on all that black plastic. So definitely worth the price. It's got big tanks. You can fill with water. And that top right picture is the Holland transplanter I was talking about. It's just a single person in the back had load up the trays just like you do on this one. And you can kind of see the cylinders right here. It just spins around and you drop them down in as it goes. And it's for planting on bare soil. So not on black plastic. So some people use them in like no-till systems. So through this program, we established what we call Market on the Mall. It's the first ever campus farmers market at Truman State University. And I'm not sure if other universities are doing these or not, I think Mizzou might do one. We do one every Wednesday, though, through August through October, or until we have a frost, which is early this year, unfortunately. But from noon to five every Wednesday, students, faculty, staff, community members that come to campus were located right in front of the Student Union Building. We bring all our fresh produce from the University Farm that's harvested either the day before or that morning. We bring it and you have live music. We have it's a high-trafficked area. Those are some of my tips that kind of helped us. You know, we put it in a high-trafficked area. We did a lot of promotion. We had signage. You can see our big banner in the back. We also had banners hanging around campus. Music, of course, people love the music. And at first year, we don't have uniforms, but eventually you can kind of see it in this picture. We decided to get uniforms. That really accentuates things, I think. Like I said, it was great. The community came out. It was real popular. It was one of the greatest projects we have going at Truman State University. You know, it's good for the students, especially our prices, we price them under what conventional produce are at the grocery store. So generally you're gonna pay more for local fresh food, but because we're just trying to be a positive image on campus, we make it affordable for the people that are there. So, and we also, I didn't mention, but we sell direct to the cafeterias. That's their Sodexo. So that's a big challenge in itself, and I'll get more into that. But the cafeterias decided they would use our food, too. I just wanna give you a little bit of statistics on what we're growing out there in our five and a half acres. Tomatoes is our main crop, just because they're the most profitable for us to sell. And I mean, they're pretty easy to grow. I think everyone can do it. So we had over 2,000 plants, and we focus on, you know, the heirlooms are great, but for what we're doing, you know, we're trying to make, you know, you're selling at the cafeterias, and you're selling direct to the people, oftentimes they want, you know, they don't want the, with your heirlooms, they get kind of mangly and crazy. I mean, they're great, I like them, but people just, they want perfection. So, and that's what they want in the cafeterias, too, because they last longer. So those are some of the varieties we grow that seem to do well. We grow all our tomatoes outside. Mountain Fresh, Primetime, those were prior to best. Sweet Chelsea was a cherry tomato that did the best for us. We just, we use tomatoes, tomato steaks, and then we do the Florida weave, if you're familiar with that, that's how we trellis them up. We do about 100 foot rows on plastic. On the ends, we do metal tee posts for extra rigidness, and then in between we do just wooden posts, and the Florida weave is, for those that are familiar, as that tomato plant's growing up, you have string that attaches to your hip, and you have a PVC pipe where you put that string through, and you tie it off on the end of the metal tee posts, and you just go down and you wrap it around each one of those wooden steaks, and you go down both sides, and as it's growing up, it's just holding that tomato plant up. So, and mostly we focus on determinants, so eventually they stop growing, so they don't get too crazy. Some of the indeterminants will just go wild. Peppers, that's another big one for us. Solinaceous crops in general are a big one, so we got potatoes too. But peppers, we had over 1,000 plants, mostly bells, some hot peppers. Hot peppers we sell mostly at Market because we noticed that the cafeterias, and we also would sell to High V a little bit in Kirkfield, they just weren't interested in hot specialty peppers, they wanted just big bell peppers. Cucumbers, we had 450 feet trellis. That's a lot of cucumbers. That's a football field, and then another half of a football field, if you could imagine, just how many cucumber plants that would be. Potatoes, we do two acres just cause potatoes are an easy sailor, pretty easy to grow. They don't take a lot of work. They're also can be stored for a pretty long time, so we actually sold out of our potatoes already of our two acres, which we sold all to the cafeteria at Truman. Melons, that's another thing that we do a pretty large amount of. Watermelons especially. We don't do the seedless ones just cause seedless ones are harder to grow, believe it or not. We like the open pollinated, like your crimson sweet, Desert King. Desert King was the most drought tolerant one we had this year. If you're familiar with that, it's a yellow flesh waterman with big black seeds. It does really well in this drought. And pumpkins, we do two acres. And summer squash, that's another big ones. And then you can see we also have some other smaller crops down there that I listed. And we just now got into cover cropping. So in our potato field, we decided to plant that in buckwheat after the potato harvest was over. Just to add organic matter, suppress weeds. We had problems with cockaburrs, velvet leaf, morning glories. So that's why we decided to put that, just to add fertility to. And then also in our melon field, one acre melon field, we put tillage rashes. They're big white radishes that break up clay soils. Northeast Missouri, we have clay soils. So they go down, break it up and they have extensive root systems that go down and pick up nitrogen from that's hardwood down in the bottom. It'll pick it up and make it usable for next season. That's kind of a new thing. A lot of farmers are doing even conventional farmers with like corn, they do corn and soybeans. So we're excited about that. They grew up, they grew pretty well. And hopefully next, they're gonna make our clay soils a little bit better to work with. Tillage radish, they also call it groundhog radish and forage radish. A lot of people will graze their livestock on too. Light, they're real nutritious for livestock. And you can actually eat them yourself. They're real, they actually call them, in Japan they call them daikons, so if you've heard of that. So, just wanted to show you pictures of our harvest right here. So we got specialty peppers, like I said, we only sold it at a market. You got bananas, cherry bombs and anchos, garlic that we sold at market too, cherry or yeah, cherry tomatoes there and those are potatoes. So down there I said, kind of listed where we sell our stuff. So the food company Sodexo, that's a challenge because they want everything perfect, unblemished. You gotta harvest it, wash it. They're real particular, your prices, of course you don't get as good with them either because they want everything in bulk and they wanna know ahead of time what you're gonna have which is oftentimes hard to predict. So that's why I really enjoyed having our weekly farmer market mark on the mall just cause it was people, seems like our customers, they were willing to pay a little bit more for their produce, we could bring our Reyes stuff and it was, you know, cause everybody was looking for something different, it didn't have to bring a bunch of bulk stuff so we could kind of focus on a bunch of different little crops and we also sold to some local establishments there in Kirksville. So on the square we have Costa Rican Cafe Co and Sweet Expressions, both kind of little novels. Coffee shops that, you know, there's kind of a revolution going up there in Northeast Missouri with getting back to the land, kind of like around, going around everywhere but especially up there where it's really rural, there's a big demand for like local foods and a lot of, a lot of activism of, you know, people trying to get into that niche market and Hivee, we also sold to Hivee, they, in their produce stand, they have a little small area for local foods. Just wanted to give you a little bit of our relationships and communities, though if any of you are maybe interested in doing a farm to school program, this is kind of what else we've done here in Kirksville. So we have the Green Thumb Project, the Kirksville Elementary School actually has a, they have a school garden, kids, it's good for the kids that after, it's an after school project so when school's over they can come out, garden, they have responsibilities, weekly duties and they also sell at the, the kids also get marketing experience because they sell at the Kirksville Farmers Market which is every Saturday so it's a great thing for the elementary school. Then we also have the Jameson Street Garden which is always a staffed by a Truman student and what that does is they get experience gardening that way and then the, the proceeds are the food that's taken from that garden is donated to a local food pantry in town. We have a local foods dinner, it's a biannual thing put on by the Eco Club which I told you about, it's an invitation to local farmers, everything they're prepared is food from the region and it just kind of celebrates the work we've done at the University Farm and farmers in that region, it's great. And we also, the interns within the program, I don't know if I mentioned it, there's two full-time interns so two students get the chance to do all this hands-on May through October, the growing season, getting their hands dirty and part of their internship is to do service work with other local farmers so we'll go out and they can get to see how other people doing it, just have some listed in the area, some farmers that, farms that they've got to go to, actually Green Valley Farm is owned by Steve Salt, he's actually speaking today on ethnic vegetables so that might be a good one to go to later. He's a really smart horticulturist. Then we also worked with MU Extension a lot and had events out at the farm from them. So the future of farm to school program, our biggest challenge is I feel like we're marketing, that's something that takes a lot of trial and error. You know, I can figure out how to grow all this stuff, you know, I've been doing this for three years now and pretty much got that down of how to grow it. It's the marketing which I've struggled with. You know, the demands there but just getting it all coordinated is very difficult I feel like. So if you got good marketing skills you can really do this successfully. You know, you kind of got to, I feel like you got to balance your direct sales to the customer and then your other sales to like, you know, your high V and institutions. Like I said, the institutions and the businesses such as high V, they're looking for the, you know, your hybrids, stuff that's unblemished, just they like bulk orders. They want to know two weeks to a week ahead of time what you're going to have and they want a consistent flow of produce. So, you know, that takes a lot of planning so you got to keep that in mind if you're going to be selling to those kind of outlets, you know, you got to be able to keep your planning, planting schedules, you know, always think about planting, repetition, when you got to really be able to focus in on that. Other thing was spoilage and waste, you know, you know, whether it was from inclement weather, disease, you know, you could have big crop losses. If you couldn't get stuff moved, some of those crops, you know, once they're harvested, they got to be gone a day so you need to have a market there pretty soon or else it's just going to go to the compost pile. So, there's that and then undesirable crops, like there's some crops that we grew, they just, people just didn't want them, you know, something we grew, they grew real well was garden huckleberries and that's not something a lot of people know what they are and they're actually for making pies and they're pretty good but not a lot of people knew what they were, they didn't want to mess with them, they took extra processing. So, there was a little bit of waste there. So, like I said, the crops that people seem to like the best, from my experience some of the salinacious ones, your tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, those sell real well, can't go wrong with them. So, some of the successes we had, really engage the community with Truman and the Northeast Missouri, Kirk'sville and you know, the community there and other small towns around it. That was important for us, we always want to make sure that we're working together. There's very practical skills for those interns involved. This wasn't, I kind of like, education, academia is great but I kind of like to, this was more of a real world experience, I think, for them. They got to learn all the ins and outs and how to run a business, basically. So, that was good, good experience. There's a lot of entertainment, we have fun out there. It provides entertainment for the campus, for the community. It's a good presence on campus and of course the aesthetics, it makes the farm look beautiful. You know, we really focus on keeping everything up there at the farm and it's great, it's delicious, so. Does anyone have any questions? Yes. Garrett, good job. But, my question is, how do you go about getting your produce into the local food market? Like for your grocery stores and that kind of thing, is there? Well, for us it was, we used a guy that was a, he was a produce mover, that was his job. He owns, his business is called Little Bebes Produce and his name is Mark Slaughter and he's from La Plata, Missouri and he also has a farm called Sunrise Farm but that's not his main focus. His main focus is to go around to other horticultural enterprises, pick up their produce and take it to these establishments like Hivee. Really, if you just need to talk to the produce manager at your grocery, if you're looking to sell at a grocery store, talk to the produce manager. Some of them have strict regulations, some of them are, you know, very atomistic about taking local produce without even really thinking about it so it's just gonna depend on, depend on the person really, so. Yeah, welcome. Say first congratulations on your success. That sounds pretty awesome. I'm interested in doing something like this in my community too and I was curious, I walked in a few minutes late, I don't know, maybe you've covered this but could you kind of go through how this came to be? I mean, was this something that the university set up? Did they have people, the marketing, especially as a part of them, kind of wondering how to get going, how to get people interested in this. So was it a group of students that kind of came up with this idea or was it a professor that got students together? How did this come to be? Right, well it came together, the origins were back in 2011 and it wasn't just, it was, it was a collaborative effort I would say of the entire campus. It's a little, Truman's a liberal arts school so there's a lot of students from the St. Louis, Kansas City area that are interested in this alternative agriculture production. You know, a lot of them had attended farmers markets and whatnot and they just were looking, local foods was something that came up when they passed a sustainability initiative about three or four years ago. Within that initiative they wanted local foods, they wanted to keep the biodiesel production going on campus, and they wanted to keep the compost project going. So it was a collaborative effort between the students, faculty and staff and to get the local foods. They had already had a local foods dinner every semester established, but there was really, other than they had a small garden plot on campus called the Community University Garden where they were growing like salad greens which the cafeteria was buying, but it wasn't, that plot wasn't any bigger in this area right here. So once that grant was received, USDA specialty crop grant, they focus all the fruit and vegetable production to be deemed at the university farm which was five and a half acres. So it went from a garden plot this size to one that was five and a half acres big. And it's the farm to school program if you're familiar with that. So I can get you information on that later if you want. As far as monetary, you know I actually don't know, but I never, because I never asked, they received it before I was, like I said when I was a student. I wanna say it was probably in the range between 50 to 100,000 somewhere around there. So, Sodexo. I went to the university. That's the, Sodexo's the food contractor for the university. And so we would, you know whenever they would give us weekly orders, maybe probably about two a week. So we'd focus on harvesting that and we'd bring it to them that day actually because the farm's only one mile from campus actually. So they would just call me up, say hey we need this this week. If you have it, bring it. If you don't, you know I need to order it. So lots of times I'd like to know a week ahead of time because they have to do their orders a week to two, between one to two weeks ahead of time. So it was always, they always wanted to heads up but sometimes they could just take stuff just on a quick order if they thought they could. So yeah, there definitely is. That's what we wanna try and do. Like I said, in the elementary school there in Kirkstall, they do have the garden. They don't use that for their own use yet. Hopefully they will, but we're trying to get more into the public schools and with the Farm to School program, I was looking at statistics in Missouri. There's already 78 schools in Missouri that are utilizing it. So I think they're located more towards your metropolitan areas right now but hopefully that'll continue to expand across Missouri. So. ["Pomp and Circumstance"]