Farm to cafeteria: Beaufort County schools stock shelves with locally grown produce
Students at Beaufort County schools will have fresh produce grown locally by the Gullah Farms Cooperative in their cafeteria lunches, officials announced this week.
The produce comes from a partnership between the school district, the cooperative and Sodexo, a company that provides food services to schools in the district, Sodexo officials said in a press release. The company worked with the cooperative to create the program, which lead to the involvement of Limehouse, the company’s regional produce distributor, to help with dispensing the crops to schools.
Plans for the project began soon after York Glover, a Beaufort County council member, retired from his position as a Cooperative Extension agent at Clemson University almost a decade ago, he said Friday. Glover is also the owner of Yorkshyre Farm on St. Helena Island. That land, he said, was purchased by his great grandparents at the end of the Civil War and has stayed in the family for generations.
“This area on St. Helena has some of the best soil ... to grow vegetables and we want to maintain that,” Glover said. “If we can maintain a productive land, we can maintain a productive culture. And the land and the culture goes hand-in-hand.”
The cooperative was founded in 2010 to give local farmers honoring local Gullah traditions their own food market. Since then, the cooperative has grown to 10 farming operations in Beaufort, Colleton, Charleston, Hampton and Jasper Counties.
The main crop he is working on for the school district will be romaine lettuce from his family’s farm, Glover said. This is because that product is already being served every day in the schools’ cafeteria salad bars. The cooperative, he said, was growing produce to be used in school lunches several years ago before a production issue forced them to suspend the services four years ago.
“We were not able to operate,” Glover said. “We had the equipment, but we didn’t have a facility.”
The facility they needed would help them package and distribute the produce, he said. The farmers decided to find their own place and were able to lease a building with the county in 2017. They have been working on getting that facility on St. Helena “up and running,” Glover said. It was unveiled on Dec. 8, 2021.
“Now that we have the building, we’re reaching back out to our member farmers to get them on board to move forward with the farm-to-school project,” he said.
Students can have the opportunity to take field trips to the farm to see the food industry — from planting and harvesting produce to packaging before heading back to school to eat “nutritious meals” composed of fresh, local ingredients, Superintendent Frank Rodriguez said.
“It gives us an opportunity to support our local farmers in Beaufort County and our children can get a chance to eat fresh produce that comes right from here, right from their backyard in Beaufort County,” he said.
This story was originally published March 14, 2022 at 4:55 AM.
