 The following is a production of New Mexico State University. New Mexico's children, our community's future, priceless in value. Like generations before them, they play, grow and learn. But these kids are growing up in a new world where everything moves at a fast pace and everyone is expected to do more in less time. Today's kids need a lot of energy to keep up. Food is fuel and nutritious food is vital to their developing bodies. They need five servings of fruit and vegetables a day and only get about two. Kids eat an increasing amount of fast food or processed foods and most of the food they eat, healthy or not so healthy, is consumed at school. Now, they are facing serious, sometimes life-threatening obesity-related consequences. Today, over 31% of all children are either overweight or obese. It's expected that in this generation of children, about 35% will develop diabetes. And it's also expected that this generation of children will be less healthy than their parents. Yes, they play, grow and learn, almost like mom and dad once did, but with some important differences. This generation can play without ever leaving their chairs. They suffer from an increase in screen time, that is, time in front of the TV, computers and video games. Our children are growing, not only growing up but growing out. Obesity is on the rise and nutrition-related diseases such as diabetes are developing in children at younger and younger ages. Our children are learning, learning to eat quickly to keep up with their fast-paced school day, learning that their food comes from a restaurant or grocery store. Some communities in New Mexico and across the nation are working to turn this trend around. Nutrition educators, farmers, school officials, parents and politicians are beginning to support and implement an initiative designed to help today's children grow up healthy. Our children's health is our community's future. The Farm to School initiative includes a variety of programs and activities that bring fresh local fruits and vegetables to school cafeterias, offer nutrition and cooking education, create school gardens, develop wellness policy changes, place healthy foods in vending machines, arrange farm field trips and visits from farmers. These programs bring farm fresh foods back into the lives of children. Eating the sometimes new and vital foods and taking part in various forms of education and awareness-building activities can make a big difference in the health of our children and strength of our communities. In the last decade, we've seen an explosive growth in farm to school programs from just a handful in 1996 to over 1,000 in 2006 in 32 states. With farm to school programs, what we hope to do is increase the health of our children as well as help keep our farmers farming. With these diet changes, we are not only decreasing the visits to the school nurse, but we are also helping children to concentrate and learn and improve their test scores. 200,000 children in New Mexico eat school meals every single day. So 65% of the food that is eaten by many children is eaten in schools. There are many players in the world of farm to school and it takes all of them to make the initiative successful, starting with farmers. Throughout New Mexico, there is increasing interest by farmers in selling to schools and by schools in purchasing New Mexico-grown products such as leafy greens, chili, onions, melons, and apples. I farm about 10 varieties of apples and my major apple is red delicious. I like being hot here in the open air and it makes me happy to see people enjoy where I grow. As part of the New Mexico Apple Council, Fred and other growers apples get sent to the schools of Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos districts. One of the challenges initially was figuring out how to go from just one vendor and move into more than one vendor for produce and it's actually been a pretty easy adjustment because the farmers are so willing to work with us. So we've now started an apple council where we can purchase all of our apples through one person, one group. So Craig, what is the apple council and can you tell me something about it? The apple council has been around since 1965 and it was basically formed as an educational group primarily of New Mexico apple growers from around the state and recently it's functioned as a clearinghouse for sales of fruit and some vegetables to the public schools. What are some of the figures of their sales? We had sales of about $12,000 in 2002 or 2003. From that we're up to around $400,000 in 2005 and it's certainly not all apples. About $100,000 of that was apple sales. The rest of it was watermelons for example, potatoes, green chili and mixed greens. My name is Eddie Villarde, I'm from Villarde, New Mexico and I'm the 10th generation apple grower. We raise apples, peaches, pears, plums and nectarines. We've been selling to the School for Kids program for about two years now and this past year we sold a lot of our apples, 90% of it went to the School for Kids mainly Albuquerque Tows and Santa Fe. If the marketing wouldn't come along with the Apple Council and New Mexico Ag we probably wouldn't be selling everything. Years ago we used to sell it all to truckers and then those guys retired, got older and the stores didn't buy directly from truckers. So we had years and years that we had to let it just drop off the trees or throw it away. So this has encouraged us to keep on planting. It gives us more employees. It's expanded our operation and makes us a viable income for us. Apples are picked from the trees at their highest point of ripeness. Loaded into bins, taken to the packing shed, run down the line where they are cleaned and sorted and packed. Apples are sorted by size. The 138s are perfect for school children because they are a little smaller than the ones you see in supermarkets. It's been a very good market that's developing because I can sell some of my smaller apples in bulk. My smaller apples used to be there to bag them. There's a market for them. The apples are kept in refrigeration units. The ideal temperature is 34 degrees. These fresh New Mexico apples are on their way to the school district food warehouse and then to individual schools. In the school kitchen, they are prepared for a snack or for a meal item. It sounds like there's a lot of opportunity for farmers in the state to be able to sell to schools. It's a tremendous opportunity. And again, I said it earlier, the schools are always going to be there. They're always going to be school-aged children. It's a market that's going to be stable, consistent, and available as long as growers are willing to meet them halfway with prices, with quality, and things of that nature. This has been a big boost not only to our orchard but to orchards throughout the state. We have multiple schools coming on, the Albuquerque Public Schools, which is one of the biggest purchasers of apples, along with the Santa Fe Public Schools and Taos. But recently at the legislature, we also had other schools approaching us that they would like to join with us. These schools out of Berlin said that they would like to start purchasing our apples this next year along the same program of what we've been doing with others. So we have seen it as a big boost not only to be able to sell apples now, but to get a price high enough that is above what any wholesaler is willing to pay us. For example, we were getting offers of $10 to $11, $12 per box from the big commercial wholesaler, just put it that way. In turn, they would turn around and mark the apples up and sell them to the same places that we are now selling. So now we have cut out that middleman and it gives us as growers the opportunity to make that extra money that we need to do the improved productions necessary for our orchard. Through these programs, we've had money available through the state, through the marketing, that we've been able to buy refrigeration because refrigeration is probably one of the most important keys to good fresh produce into the schools not only during season, but to extend our season even further. For example, we just delivered to Tau schools, in fact, we're delivering this week to there tomorrow to Tau schools and here we're what, February the 15th? That was unheard of years ago without the refrigeration. So this program has been a big benefit in many different ways. Many growers are coming on board and they see a hope now that before many of these second, third and fourth generations, they decided not to go into apple production. They were pulling their orchards out, maybe putting it into pasture, maybe putting it into housing, you know, subdivide and sell them to land off. Now we're starting to see a small reversal of that practice where people are planting new trees because there is hope now. Other players in the farm to school world are the administrators, teachers and parents. Hi, my name is Elaine Baca and this is my daughter Sasha. She's one of four students that I have here at Alboard Community School. I am also an Alboard employee. I work as an educational assistant and for a year I had the pleasure of doing noon duty, which has been a real big eye-opener for me. I have begun to realize that when I grew up we didn't know very much about nutrition and as time has passed and we've become busy in our lives, it's real easy to slip in a hot pocket for lunch for the kids and, you know, kind of forget about nutrition. One of the things that I enjoy about this school is that we are part of the Farms to School program and we actually have a wonderful salad bar and it's been a great treat to watch the kids try something healthy and actually enjoy it for a change. They'll be able to go on and move forward, have a better diet and have a healthier life as a result of it. Last year the Robert Wood Foundation supported our school in having our students in grades preschool through fifth grade get snacks two times a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays and we were able to introduce kids and kids that never had tried fresh vegetables or fruit were trying it for the first time and liking it. Now there are several kids that do like it's just they don't have that ability because we are a school that has high poverty, you know, low socioeconomic status and so it's expensive to get those kinds of foods so they don't have the opportunity but when they were given the opportunity they sure took it and they enjoyed it very much so it was a great initiative that I was sad wasn't able to continue. Because we didn't have additional funding for continuing with the Healthy Snacks initiative we were able and we were given the opportunity to participate with Kids Cook. It's a wonderful opportunity for all of the students in grades kindergarten through fifth grade to work with a nutrition expert around good behaviors in the kitchen, the hygienic part of being in the kitchen, the safety part of working with knives and then the end result of making something that's healthy. One of the things that I do recall that the classes were making were mango and rice balls and the kids just loved it. It was real sweet almost like candy and they couldn't believe that they got to make it and so it was something that was a very different experience for them. They make anywhere from juice to soup to salsa and what they love about it and I've gotten to talk to the gal she's a young gal that comes in and works with all the kids and I asked her, I said, do all the kids try? She says they do because they made it even if they said I don't like rice or I don't like mango but they will try what they made probably because of that ownership that they had in making the food. For me that's almost a little bit better than the healthy snacks because the kids took pride in making something so they're going to try something that they made. Sometimes trying new foods is difficult for children. Successful programs around the country along with the change in the cafeteria offerings in favor of more fresh fruits and vegetables use additional educational activities to help new eating habits stick. Here are some proven activities that enrich children's minds and satisfy their taste buds. Farmers speak in classrooms and at career days sharing their lives in the food that they produce. These talks are tailored to satisfy some of the grade level specific educational standards for teaching math, science and other subjects. Whatever you mean, any critter in nature a plant or an animal or an insect or an arachnid or anything they all have a first name, the genus and it's always capitalized business. Kids take field trips to farms and experience first hand the life of a farmer planting seeds, making compost, weeding, harvesting and of course eating what farmers grow. Some kids even have the chance to grow their own food in their own school garden. Kids can take experimental cooking classes in schools such as cooking with kids in Santa Fe and kids cook in Albuquerque. Cooking with kids is a program that teaches kids about healthy food choices and the idea is if kids help prepare the food perhaps food they've never tasted before they're more apt to want to eat it and for example now we're making rice and lentils, Indian rice, East Indian rice and lentils and this is a food that the children will also be eating in the cafeteria. The cafeteria prepares meals the same as what we make in cooking with kids so the kids have had some chance to make it ahead of time so it's not such a shock when they get in the cafeteria. This class that we have today is a fourth grade class Mrs. Gonzalez says fourth grade bilingual class we have a lot of bilingual kids here at Sweeney and a lot of these kids have been in the program since they were in kindergarten so they kind of know the drill and it's really nice and they have a lot of confidence that they gain from being able to cook. That's a lot of, in a lot of families that's not a skill that is necessarily taught to children anymore so it's really empowering for kids and at the end of each class we'll send them home with a recipe so the idea is maybe they get home, they're all excited about a food that they made in cooking with kids and they'll go home and try it with their families. My children right now are 14 years old and they were also students here at Sweeney Elementary and when they were growing up they also took cooking with kids' classes and their chore I guess was they would come learn the meal at this class and then on Sundays at home they were in charge of making Sunday dinner with these these recipes. Another component is the tasting the tasting classes and those are done in the classroom the teacher facilitates those tasting generally is produced to the classroom for each teacher and the kids are able to taste say a variety of apples and often we get new Mexico apples so it's a neat way to be able to tell the kids to teach the kids about where their food comes from the lesson plans to go along with the apple tasting I'll just use that as an example there's a picture of the farmer who grew the apples and it's so cute because a lot of the kids this is in the fall we get locally grown produce so we do it in the fall and the kids will run up to me and they're all like little apple connoisseurs now they know they like to eat Granny Smith instead of Rome it's just fun they learn a lot of things about food about produce that they wouldn't necessarily get anywhere else Nutrition educators from programs such as iCan Creation Just Be It Eat Smart, Play Hard and WIC teach in schools, clinics and other locations around the community snack programs emphasizing fruits and vegetables have been instituted in New Mexico the USDA Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Pilot Program which is now in 25 schools around the state allows extra funding for snack programs built on fruit and vegetable consumption this program is also in 17 other states and 3 tribal affiliations and has been very successful in getting kids off the sugar snack roller coaster one example of a really successful farm to school program is in North Carolina in western North Carolina one of the sustainable agriculture project has been successful in bringing farmers and food service directors together to start on all aspects of farm to school programs one of the ways that this began was when a farmer brought his lettuce into a school and the food service director and the administrators realized that his lettuce was much better than anything else they were buying on the commercial market and it was cheaper also in North Carolina they got and visit farms and they had the opportunity to taste raw okra in a garden the program is working well I encourage anyone to start a program like this because it is workable and it's fun the programs within the farm to school initiative have a profound impact on the life of a child but these programs have not been implemented in all parts of New Mexico more people need to get involved in the active interest in the health of today's children attention concerned citizens there are many ways to get involved in the farm to school initiative talk to the people who run the school food service in your school district get to know your local farmers go to the farmers and growers markets in your area and ask them if they can sell to your school make it a PTA project to replace those not so nutritious snack items with fresh fruits in season support the state legislation that will give more funds to schools to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables encourage a shift to having recess before lunch and try to increase the time that children have to eat and savor lunch the average is 20 minutes half of which may be spent at your local school and ask what you can do to help improve children's diets in school attention farmers here's what you can do to help children find out what food schools in your area are looking to purchase grow and harvest varieties that schools prefer clean and pack your product properly make yourself or your farm available for educational experiences good eating habits that children are developing in the cafeteria learn about ways to start a buying relationship with schools in your area attention school officials here's how you can help children always use the New Mexico products that come from the commodities bureau and request more of these New Mexico products ask your broker to highlight the New Mexico products that they have order as much of these products as you can visit farms or visit the farmers market in your area once you get to know the local farmers you'll see how much they want to help our children eat well our children's health longevity and ability to learn depend on what they are eating right now there are many ways we can all work toward bringing a healthier diet to our children nearby school districts have already taken steps towards a healthy school diet please support them or start your own farm to school program because our children's health is our community's future the preceding was a production of New Mexico State University the views and opinions in this program are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the NMSU Board of Regents