Page 30 - Valley Table- Winter 2025

producers. It makes food more
real, a thing that is grown and
cultivated from the earth,
sustainably, with the goal of
nourishing our bodies and not
harming our environment.
Oh, if only it were all so easy.
Given that there are thousands
of acres of farms and producers
all over the Hudson Valley,
fresh-from-farm-to-school
meals may seem like an
obvious idea. But the sweet
simplicity of “farm-to-table”
eating is no match for the
grim reality of the institutional
procurement practices, rules,
and regulations that largely
control what school food
service directors serve up.
“It’s a lot of math,” admits
Larry Anthony, the longtime
food service director for the
Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and
Pine Plains central school
districts. “And the logistics. The
logistics of working all this out
is what makes farm-to-school
lunches so challenging.”
“The math” is what shapes
every single decision a food
service director makes, with
each penny spent per meal
carefully considered and
each calorie painstakingly
parsed in order to jibe with
national guidelines set by
the USDA and its National
School Lunch Program,
which provides funding for
meals and determines what
must be included in those
meals. “Procurement laws
make a lot of red tape,” says
Lauren Collica, food service
director at Pawling Central
School District. “We can’t
just throw caution to the
wind and purchase whatever
we want whenever we want,
so the bidding process is
just hard for small farms and
small businesses and also
disadvantaged businesses.”
And neither farms nor
schools are a one-size-fits-all
piece in the procurement
puzzle. “I’ve reached out to
farmers, but to put carrots on
the menu in all my schools, I
need 1,200 pounds of carrots,”
says Anthony. “And they’re
like, ‘Wow, that’s more than
we can do.’” Fortunately, this
reality didn’t sway Anthony,
who has been food service
director at Red Hook and
Rhinebeck since 2014.
“We have so many local
farms,” he says, “and I just want
to show the kids what’s out
there in the world and in the
Hudson Valley. I don’t know
how you can miss when you
look at all the resources that
are available and what we can
bring to the table,” he says,
intentionally landing the pun.
Anthony started scouting
local farms, like Hearty Roots
Farms in Germantown for
produce, Feather Ridge Farm
in Elizaville for eggs, and then
Hudson Valley Fresh came
on board, 8 or 9 years ago, to
supply milk to all three school
districts Anthony oversees. All
28 Valley Table | December 2024 – February 2025
of that was a labor of love—
and legwork.
Support is Growing
Fortunately, Anthony wasn’t
alone in thinking that getting
local farm food to the schools
was a good idea. Beginning
in 2015, both federal and
state governments launched
programs to solve and support
the use of local farm products
in institutional settings, most
notably Governor Andrew
Cuomo’s “No Student Goes
Hungry” Program, which
foods. This also funded the
“boots on the ground,” the
folks who could connect
producers, distributors, and
school districts.
A pair of those boots
belongs to Kristy Apostolides,
a regional Farm-to-School
Coordinator for the Lower
Hudson Valley at the Cornell
Cooperative Extension,
who started her career in
sustainable agriculture and
food systems work. “The
objective of these programs
is to increase the volume and
It’s the excitement
of planning the
next great meal
that keeps all of
these food service
directors doing the
complicated math and
procurement.
expanded funding for the
existing Farm-to-School
program. It also launched
a reimbursement program,
creating a financial incentive
to entice school districts to
wade into the complications
of local procurement, by
offering an additional 19.1
cents per meal if the school
district could reach a
threshold of 30 percent locally
sourced, minimally processed
variety of New York state food
products in schools,” she says.
Katie Sheehan-Lopez
is also a Farm-to-School
Coordinator for the mid-
Hudson Valley. “This job is
really coordinating the supply
chain. So, we work with the
producers, the distributors,
the people who are doing the
purchasing, which is usually
the school food service
director. And sometimes there