School-Grown Goodness: SCUSD's Orchard and Cafeteria Farm
SCUSD’s bountiful farm feeds student minds and fills cafeterias with seasonal, nutritious dishes.
Farm manager David Tuttle swings down from the cab of his white pickup and adds a final load of just-picked bright red peppers, placing them alongside 100 pounds of heirloom tomatoes still warm from the late-September sun.
Off to the farmers market? No. These organic beauties are bound for Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, where in just a few hours they’ll be sliced up and offered to 2,000 students as part of the school’s daily cafeteria lunch.
What’s unusual about this local produce is that it was grown by the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) on its very own 11-acre farm tucked in the Sunnyvale suburbs.
Really? A real working school farm—not just a school garden—supporting multiple local schools in the middle of Silicon Valley?
Yes. SCUSD’s vibrant and abundant farm—in operation since August 2017—has already supplied over 40,000 pounds of organically grown produce to 15,500 students in 26 schools. Along with all this healthy fresh produce, the school district is expanding nutritional education in cafeterias and through on-the-farm experiences.
“The farm gives kids access to local organically grown fruits and vegetables—picked and served at peak ripeness—to expose them to good nutrition and healthy eating habits,” said Karen Luna, nutrition services director for the district. “The produce supplements our food services program and the kids love it!”
If you drive by the farm during different seasons, you’ll see tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers, rainbow carrots, fava beans, lettuce, cabbage, kale, snap peas, corn, zucchini, butternut squash, eggplant, basil and cilantro thriving in the rich soil. You may also see the fruit orchard, with blood oranges, figs, pears, apples, persimmons and nectarines—part of the 63 fruit trees donated by a local tech company.
There are also 16 beehives, and the first honey has just been harvested. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) rules don’t allow raw honey to be served in schools—it contains natural bacteria—so it will be cooked and served with various dishes, perhaps with apple slices this fall.
What happens to all that produce? Much of it is simply sliced and served in cafeteria salad bars. Bumper crops of tomatoes are sent to a processor where they are turned into pulp that is used in-house to make tomato sauce for cafeteria-made lasagna, spaghetti sauce and sloppy joes. This year, butternut squash will be puréed and frozen for winter soups, or cut into cubes for roasting. Next year, says David, he may grow tomatillos since one of the school’s chefs has a passion for making chile verde.
Karen says the food served to students in the district’s middle and high schools is at least 50% made from scratch, and the department’s goal is to eliminate preservatives and artificial flavors. The chefs—some with experience at top restaurants like the Left Bank—regularly meet with David to anticipate what produce will be coming from the fields.
They turn this bounty into chef-prepared dishes like basil pesto pasta and eggplant parmesan. The chefs have also experimented with new offerings, like the kale chips they baked and tested with students (a hit!). The district even has a food truck, which makes its rounds among the schools, serving tacos with tomatoes and lettuce right from the farm.
According to David, Karen is “breaking the rules” when it comes to putting high-quality food in front of students. Karen uses Ag Link, a California-based marketplace that connects local family farms with school food services, to purchase produce grown closer to home. It’s a win-win-win situation. Local farmers get a ready market for volume purchases, schools are able to buy local and seasonal produce and students receive higher nutrition from fresh produce.
She also chooses carefully from the products offered by USDA-approved vendors. “I choose products with the lowest amount of additives, and I buy whole-muscle chicken and grass-fed beef from California ranches.”
Having the farm gives Karen more flexibility in meeting the USDA school lunch requirements, as well as meeting her own high standards for balanced and nutritional meals. Schools have a limited budget for each meal offered to students and are required to serve a minimum amount of red, orange and dark green vegetables every week. Organic food is generally too expensive to purchase, so Luna supplements menus with the SCUSD organically grown farm produce as much as possible.
The roots of the farm can be traced back to the heyday of agriculture in Silicon Valley, when it reportedly used to be a cherry orchard, later becoming a sports field for a high school. For 10 years, it was the site of the organic Full Circle Farm until SCUSD took over management of the farm about two years ago.
David and Karen develop the master plan for the farm. They met at a farm-to-school event where Karen purchased carrots from Jacob’s Farm (located at Martial Cottle Park), where David farmed. A former tech employee, David left all that behind to return to his passion for farming, growing crops in Gilroy and later at Jacob’s Farm. When SCUSD took over Full Circle Farm, David was brought on to manage the farm.
“We’re hoping that introducing kids to fresh food and where it comes from will shape their eating habits later in life,” says David. “Every year that we introduce them to more varieties of fruits and vegetables, the more open to fresh produce they will become.”
Stella Kemp, the new superintendent of SCUSD, says that few districts have the chance to provide their students with something as unique as the farm.
“Students can’t get any more local or fresh than food from our farm,” says Stella. “In addition, our students get an opportunity to learn from and interact with our farmer, chefs and nutrition staff regarding healthy food options, including how to grow and prepare their own food. We see firsthand that students taking part in growing their own food are more likely to reach for fruits and vegetables.
“For us, nutritional services are part of the whole-child programming that we offer to students,” she says. “Students who eat well and have have access to nutritional education have increased academic potential. Studies show that nutrition-rich school meals support a student’s cognitive ability, concentration, energy and academic performance.”
What’s on the menu tomorrow?
“Figs,” says school farm manager David Tuttle. “The kids like funky stuff, they think it’s cool. We’ll see what they think of these!”
