October is National Farm to School Month. In the Cowboy State, a big part of that movement is the Farm to School program, which gets local food, like beef, lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, sweet corn and green beans, on students’ plates in the majority of school districts around Wyoming.
The state’s program is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Patrick Leahy Farm to School Program and is run by the Wyoming Department of Education. Oct. 8 is the second annual Farm to School Day in Wyoming, with schools around the state celebrating the day with specially-designed aprons and stickers.
Farm to School has grown significantly in the last few years. In 2024, Wyoming beat out seven other states to win the Mountain Plains Region Crunch Off, a competition for serving the most locally grown food bites per capita in lunchrooms.
According to a press release from the Wyoming Department of Education, Wyoming jumped from under 2,000 “crunches” in 2023 to nearly 40,000 the next year – a 2,000% increase that bumped previous champion Nebraska off the podium.
Bobby Lane is the program’s coordinator and said he’s keeping his eyes open for ways to keep the momentum going.
“I'm constantly looking for producers,” he said. “I carry a pair of binoculars around with me looking for greenhouses or hydroponics units, and it's amazing what I've found.”
Lane has orbited in the world of agriculture for almost 40 years, working his own farm outside of Riverton and most recently running the agriculture program at the Wyoming Honor Farm.
One of the main jobs in Lane’s current role is serving as a connector and negotiator between schools and producers around the state.
“ It's a market that many producers didn't realize they had,” he said. “When you look at school cafeterias, we're their largest restaurant chain in the state, and that's a lot of food for kids.”
Another big piece of the program is helping both students and adults learn more about food and where it comes from. Take, for example, the Harvest of the Month initiative, which highlights a local food that’s been woven into a school’s lunch program.
“We do an educational piece on [the product], how it's grown, how it's served, how it's harvested and planted, and what the calorie benefits and nutritional benefits are,” said Lane.
While many more Wyoming-grown goods are making their way onto cafeteria trays, the mismatched timelines of the school year and the short growing season do create some logistical hurdles for the program. It also faces other speed bumps that mirror other challenges for producers in Wyoming, like a lack of centralized food distribution centers and cold storage shortages.
“ Trying to make a producer that's on the east side of the state get a product to a school that's on the west side of the state is a challenge,” said Lane. “We continue to work on the infrastructure through grant programs and producers to build up their distribution.”
As with many federal programs, future funding for the Farm to School program is another question mark, with its current block grant set to expire next fall. The USDA just put out an application for a new, more competitive version of the grant for next year, which the Wyoming Department of Education plans to apply for again.
“ We're on a roll. The ball's rolling down the mountain, just getting bigger, so I'm loving it,” said Lane. “Everybody asks me, ‘When are you gonna retire?’ And I say, ‘Never, because I love what I do.’”
But the Trump administration terminated another similar USDA grant, the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement, this spring. Lane said that grant was over $1 million and that a lot of the planning for it was already in motion when the news of the cancellation hit in March.
“ I had already gone around and started working with the producers, doing projections of what we needed to produce, where we were going to deliver to, all the different schools that were going to get food and what kind they were going to get … to come back and say ‘Sorry, not going to happen.’ That was rough.”
Food stakeholders will gather for a free Farm to School Conference and Expo in Casper on Oct. 27 and 28. The event includes cooking classes, information sessions and networking opportunities to strengthen efforts to get local food to students across Wyoming.
