"The abrupt cancellation of a beloved farm-to-school grant program threatens food access, school gardens, and small farms nationwide."
"Early in the morning last Monday, a group of third graders huddled in the garden of Mendota Elementary School in Madison, Wisconsin. Of the dozen students present, a handful were busy filling up buckets of compost, others were readying soil beds for spring planting, while a number carefully watered freshly planted radishes and peas. The students were all busy with their assorted tasks until a gleeful shout rang across the space. Everything ground to a halt when a beaming boy triumphantly raised his gloved hand, displaying a gaggle of worms. The group of riveted eight- and nine-year-olds dropped everything to cluster around him and the writhing mass of invertebrates.
“They’re mending the soil one week, and then the next week they’re going to start to see these little seedlings pop through the soil, because they’re healthy and they’re happy and they have sunshine, and they’ve watered them,” said Erica Krug, farm-to-school director at Rooted, a Wisconsin nonprofit community agricultural organization that helps oversee the garden.
Krug stopped by the school that day to join the class, which her team runs together with AmeriCorps. Outdoor programming like this, said Krug, positions students to learn how to grow food — and take care of the planet that bears it.
First established some 25 years ago, in a historically underserved area that has long struggled with access to healthy food, the small but thriving garden is now a mainstay in the Mendota curriculum. The produce grown there is routinely collected and taken to local food pantries. Later this spring, the third grade class plans to plant watermelon and pumpkin seeds. Come summer, the garden will open to the surrounding community to harvest crops like garlic, tomatoes, zucchini, collards, and squash, and take home what they need."
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