Hanmei Hoffman and her husband Derrick Hoffman farm in Greeley, Colorado, where most of their produce is sold to schools. Here she’s moving boxes of cucumbers from a refrigerated container and loading them onto a waiting truck to deliver them to schools along Colorado’s Front Range.
Rae Solomon/Harvest Public Media
On a hot, buggy morning in mid August, Derrick Hoffman poked around a densely packed row of bushy cherry tomato plants, looking for the ripest tomatoes.
Hoffman and a handful of farm hands were looking for the ones already deepened to the just right shade of red. “Or light orange,” Hoffman said. “Because once you put a red one with an orange one, they all turn red.”
It’s better if they don’t all turn red too quickly, Hoffman said, because once these tomatoes leave his 100-acre farm on the outskirts of Greeley, Colo., they have to fit with the lunch service schedule at a local public school.
The farm is just five miles from the Greeley Evans School District food services warehouse, and grows peppers, eggplant, kale, bok choy and broccoli among other veggies.
This fall, kids will be snacking on Hoffman’s produce in nearby school cafeterias.
Hoffman is part of a growing farm-to-school movement that is revolutionizing the humble school lunch. When Farm to School programming works as designed, kids fill their plates with fresh, nutritious food, and local farm economies get a major boost, creating a more resilient regional food supply chain.
It’s an idea that has bipartisan support, said Sunny Baker, senior director of programs and policy at the National Farm to School Network.
“Farm to school is really easy,”…
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