The Partnering Anthropology with Science and Technology (PAST) Foundation has partnered with Zanesville City Schools and The Ocean’s Friend Aquaculture (TOFA), an Ohio company, to implement their 2021-2022 USDA Farm to School grant. The goal is to engage students in aquaculture, agriculture, and to provide training for students and educators in entrepreneurship with Lean 6 Sigma.

PAST and Zanesville educators are developing and implementing hands-on Problem Based Learning (PBL) with their students around aquaculture. Students contribute through research and considering the specifications for building and maintaining fish tanks, evaluating equipment, costs, space, and project management. 

Along with the aquaculture infrastructure, students and educators are growing garden produce for their school meals. To date, approximately 50 lbs. of romaine lettuce has been turned over to the chef for use in the middle and high schools. In addition to school grown romaine, Zanesville City Schools food services will be the primary beneficiary for the seafood produced in this project.

Photo: Students place pots to visualize how big the aquaculture tanks will be in the space. Zanesville students can apply their PBL lessons using real world scenarios through their Farm to School work.

Community Food Initiatives (CFI) is a non-profit based in Athens, Ohio working to ensure equal access to fresh, healthy food for Appalachian Ohio. 

The organization works closely with schools to deliver their garden-based program Sprouts, which engages students in hands-on lessons both inside classrooms and outside in school gardens. At rural Amesville Elementary, in the Federal Hocking School District, students were extra excited about getting back to exploratory garden learning after a long period of pandemic-related online schooling. Enthusiasm was high for a bumper crop of radishes that went into the school cafeteria salad bar, seed saving with pumpkins, and harvesting their own loofah sponge gourds!

Photo: Students engage in hands on learning, like their seed saving with pumpkin project, in the Sprouts School Garden Program in Amesville, Ohio.  

Rural Action Sustainable Agriculture is hard at work expanding the range of farm to school products offered to local schools. In addition to frozen fruits and vegetables, fresh salad mixes, and more, a surplus of apples following the annual Apple Crunch Day celebrations inspired some new ideas.

Utilizing equipment with partners at the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks (ACEnet), those surplus apples were turned into delicious, dehydrated apple chips which turned out to be very popular with students at Amesville and Coolville Elementary Schools! Since dehydration is a tasty way to extend the shelf life of fruits and veggies, Rural Action is also trying out sweet potato chips, and who knows what other foods might follow!

To use dried fruit, like these apples, in your child nutrition programs, know that whole dried fruit and whole dried fruit pieces credit at twice the volume served. For example, if you have 1/4 cup dried fruit, this will credit as 1/2 cup fruit.  

Photo: Rural Action sources apples from Wagner's Fruit Farm in Waterford, Ohio and sweet potatoes from multiple Amish growers through the Chesterhill Produce Auction. 

The Federal Hocking Local School system is committed to serving healthy nutritious meals to their students. The district was awarded a 2020 USDA implementation grant of $98,000. With matching funds from both the Federal Hocking Local Schools and Rural Action, the grant funds a full-time coordinator for the first year of the program, kitchen equipment to support increased processing needs, and student engagement activities like farm tours, increased education about food, school garden activities and special school events.

Federal Hocking Schools use their school gardens to grow fresh produce which is then used in their cafeterias. A partnership between the Culinary Program at the local vocational high school and the Federal Hocking School system has engaged students in taste tests and recipe development using local produce.

By increasing the amount of local food provided in cafeterias, the district can feed students well and create opportunities in agriculture for both students and farmers/producers. 

Photo: A peek inside the blast freezer purchased in 2021. Along with two vacuum devises, this freezer allows Federal Hocking Schools to preserve summer produce for use throughout the academic year.