In an Era of Mega-Farms, These Schools Still Serve (Some) Locally Grown Food

Jeanine Bowman has been working to improve school lunches in Minnesota for more than a decade. Long a champion of small farms and local agriculture, the district food service director for the Morris, Minnesota public schools uses as much of her budget as she can to supply school lunches with foods from local farms, including cabbage, peppers and tomatoes.

Take tomato soup. Cans of soup can be high in sodium. “We found that if we made it from scratch, using fresh tomatoes, that we can lower that sodium. So now we could serve it with a grilled cheese, which is what the kids liked, and still have a lower sodium meal,” Bowman tells Sentient. Lower sodium means the meal fits the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s nutrition standards, making it a win-win.

There is plenty of debate about where the U.S. food system is headed, but Bowman is more focused on the communities where she lives and works. In her experience, sourcing from nearby farms has meant fresher-tasting food that appeals to kids, parents and school district officials. It’s also a way to keep more dollars closer to home. “We want to be able to support our local economy,” she says. It’s why she focuses not just on buying local, but on buying from smaller producers. “It tastes better. It’s better for them,” says Bowman. “We know where it comes from.”

Fewer Agricultural Jobs in Rural Communities

Over the last several decades, the number of farms in the United States has dramatically decreased as the remaining farms have grown bigger — both in terms of land and livestock.

The average dairy farm, for example, grew from 112 cows to 283 between 2000 and 2021, with farms housing more than 1,000 animals increasing by 60% in a similar timeframe. The shift in farms focused on feed crops has also been significant. A 2013 USDA report found that the number of midsize crop farms shrank and those with more than 2,000 acres ballooned between 1982 and 2007.

Farm consolidation has hit midsized farms in the Midwestern United States particularly hard. The Midwest lost about half its midsized crop farms, almost 230,000 of them, between 1978 and 2017, according to a white paper published by the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists. Eight Midwestern states — Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin — “have experienced especially severe consolidation,” the report notes.

Another facet of this trend is the job loss in rural communities. Since 1969, on-farm employment has decreased by 36%. And local feed stores and equipment suppliers have increasingly shuttered.

Fresher Apples and Less Food Waste

Surrounded by the agricultural fields of west central Minnesota, Morris is home to just over 5,000 people and the headquarters of one of the state’s largest dairy operations.

In the 17 years she’s been with Morris schools, Bowman says she’s increased local purchasing to an estimated 10–15% of her food purchases. Her local purchasing “exploded” when she was awarded a grant funded by the USDA and administered by Minnesota in 2023, she says. In 2026, the USDA has committed to spending up to $18 million on similar grants across the country.

Since then she’s won several more grants to expand her local purchasing to new foods. With each new order, she works to make that product part of the routine, allocating dollars out of her normal budget. This year, about a fifth of her spending on local food is covered by a grant, she says, with the rest coming out of her normal budget.

The kids notice the difference in quality. Kitchen staffers tell Bowman that less food is wasted on days when they serve local foods, and she’s seen an increase in the number of kids eating breakfast at school as well.

Bowman works directly with nine producers and farms in West Central Minnesota and, through other distributors, an additional 12 local producers. There is plenty on the menu, including school lunch sides throughout the school year like “roasted potatoes, sweet corn, green beans, squash, sweet carrots, some black beans along with edamame and our wild rice blend,” Bowman writes.

Many of the local offerings are seasonal. “In the fall and into early winter, we also add apples (through January), watermelon, cantaloupe, radishes, peppers, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, pears, onions and sweet ear corn,” Bowman writes. “We also purchase things like honey and maple syrup to use in recipes all year long. This spring we will add asparagus,” she adds.

Simple Living is one of the farms that supplies Morris schools. They don’t have a contract, Jeanne Anderson, who owns and runs the farm with her family, tells Sentient. Instead, Bowman just calls them up when she needs something. “If I got it, we work it out,” says Anderson.

Troy and Tracy Heald run another of Bowman’s suppliers: Country Blossom Farm, an apple orchard in Alexandria, Minnesota. Bowman’s apple orders for the district have created “a good relationship financially,” the Healds write to Sentient in an email. They say the biggest motivator for selling their apples to the school district is getting the kids excited to eat healthy foods.

Bowman says she hears “a lot of great comments” about the locally produced foods she procures. “Our school board and our administration are very much in favor and offer a lot of support,” she says. Parents praise the quality of the food when they have a chance to try it.

Matchmaking Farmers and Schools to Boost Local Spending

Scott DeMuth, food systems organizer for the Minnesota-based nonprofit Land Stewardship Project, tells Sentient that some school administrators and superintendents are willing to pay “a premium to be good neighbors” — investing in local farmers and producers to keep “these people in our community.”

According to an analysis carried out by the nonprofit, school food procurers across West Central Minnesota are interested in purchasing more local foods, but barriers remain. A key challenge is maintaining the staff necessary to locate and prepare fresh foods, which take more hours of labor to cook.

“This last year, we had a really weird growing season,” Bowman says, and it was challenging to plan around. The sweet corn she had ordered last year grew more slowly than expected, forcing Bowman to pivot to fill the gap in the menu. Farmers make changes too. The producer she had previously relied on for squash ended up retiring a year earlier than expected. “There’s always glitches,” she says.

To reduce some of the administrative burden on schools, DeMuth’s group is creating a database of the foods that schools are currently procuring and how much they pay for them, along with what local farmers are producing and what they charge. “We’ve been doing this big matchmaking list between producers that want to sell into schools, and then what schools are interested in buying,” DeMuth says. “It might cost a little bit more to purchase from local producers, but we’re generating and regenerating our economy here,” he says.

“Economics are definitely a part of this,” says DeMuth, but they are not the only factor. “We want to see vibrant rural communities. We want to see people being paid a fair wage, but we also want healthy water. We also want healthy land. We want healthy communities.”