NOYO Food Forest

Have you ever heard of a Food Forest?  It sounds something you can find in the woods outside Willy Wonka’s factory, right?  Join us as we explore the relationship with Fort Bragg, California’s school district Nutrition Services Director Pilar Gray and Director of Operations for the NOYO Food Forest, Beth Horkman.

Transcript

NOYO Food Forest

Transcript

00:00:05 Michelle

Welcome to the farm to school podcast where you will hear stories of how youth thrive and farmers prosper when we learn how to grow, cook and eat delicious, nutritious local foods in schools across the country and the world. We’re your hosts, I’m Michelle Markestyn.

00:00:19 Rick

And I'm Rick Sherman. And today we have a couple guests from the Fort Bragg, CA area. We have Pilar Gray, who is a food service director from Fort Bragg Unified School District and in Fort Bragg, and Beth Horkman is the director of operations for the NOYO Food Forest, also in Fort Bragg, so, so Beth and Pilar welcome to the program.

00:00:38 Michelle

Hey. Hi, Pilar and Beth.

00:00:42 Beth Horkman

Hi, thanks for having us.

00:00:44 Pilar Gray

Thank you. Happy to be here.

00:00:46

So our first questions and how like we like to ask is like paint us a picture of your area and how did you get started in this field. Go ahead and tell us a little bit. Beth, How did you end up at the Noyo Food Forest and also follow up question…

00:01:04 Michelle

What the heck is a food forest?

00:01:06 Rick

Yeah, we wanna know that. We heard that term thrown around a lot.

00:01:10 Michelle

How did we not come up with that in Oregon?

00:01:18 Beth Horkman

Awesome. Well. Thanks for having me. I found the Mendocino coast in 20. I'm originally from Wisconsin and when I landed on the Mendocino Coast, I shortly was going to these Earth Day festivals that the New York Food Forest put on. And that's when I first learned about the New York Food Forest, and I was completely blown away just by the concept of school gardens. It was foreign to me. Coming from Wisconsin, we didn't have anything like it. And I admired how it connected students to food in such a direct, meaningful way. And when a position opened up, I applied and jumped in that to it and wanted to get started. It’s an amazing organization that's been around since 2006. And we're located on the Fort Bag High School campus, which is really cool and unique for about an acre farm.

00:02:12 Rick

So on school property, then.

00:02:14 Beth Horkman

Yeah, we're right on the school property. And then I guess if you want to get into the what a food force exactly is food force mimics like a natural ecosystem with layers such as like trees and Berry bushes, edible ground cover vines. And when you think of a traditional garden, you would think maybe a raised beds or rows of vegetables. A Food Forest is a long term sustainable. It brings and support the soil health, biodiversity and we integrate both models here at Noyo Food Forest. It helps provide a full education on food systems.

00:02:58 Rick

OK. Thanks for that. I just have it in my mind like if Willy Wonka had a garden outside, it would be a food forest.. Just brings that image up to my head so.

00:03:11 Michelle

How does the Food nutrition services at Fort Bragg Unified School District dovetail with the food forest or other activities?

00:03:25 Pilar Gray

Oh well, they are our strongest partner in Fort Bragg. We're in a very rural coastal area that doesn't have a whole lot of farms out here. Not in a agriculturally rich area. So, it makes doing farm to school a little bit more challenging, so. You know our nonprofit partner right there on the on the high school grounds growing food for our school meals is amazing. It's such a gift. to us, they've carried us many too many times where we couldn't get another local farm that's right there. And the extra bonus is that our kids to participate in. Our students get out there and can actually help grow food that they are eating at lunch.

00:04:08 Rick

And Pillard tell us, how did you get to start - How long have you been a food service director? How did you end up in your role?

00:04:18 Pilar Gray

Well, it's a bit of an interesting story. I used to be a teacher and I like changed my. I needed to take care of my mother. She ended up moving to Fort Bragg. When I came up here and there were no teaching jobs opened. And the nutrition director at that time had suddenly resigned, and he was overseeing nutrition education grant. They hired me to administer a nutrition education grant for district, and I guess they liked what I did because when I've done, they offer me the Nutrition Services director position.  Well, I had no clue what that was, and no idea what I was getting into. It's literally, you know it's just horrifying..  food. So clearly they didn't know what was getting into either.

00:05:06 Michelle

Right. No, it's not OK.

00:05:09 Pilar Gray

Yeah. And I thought,   I'll do this until a teaching position opens up.  You know I needed a paycheck. So I started doing it and then I quickly realized how important this work is. It took me.. little town like I guess, in every town… or feeding the towns children at school and for a lot of these kids, particularly the poor district.  Those are getting a good portion of the food that they're eating and often the healthiest food that they're eating. So you know, instead of being able to just support one classroom with kids in this position, I'm able to support an entire district with two kids and the community itself. A service to our families. So you know I stuck with it. And 20 years later,  I'm still doing it.

00:05:52 Michelle

That's amazing. Wow.

00:05:54 Rick

Yeah. Thank you for that. So I have AI have a picture in my head now of both operations- I have the food forest,  I have the Fort Bragg School District Nutrition services in our line of work, that is to say, the farm to school work. We always say that's where the magic happens. When you have a cafeteria and then you have a school garden or nutrition education about where your food comes from and they you get two different operations and they both work together, which is what we have here and this is like these are our favorite things to delve into. We've had a couple other episodes where this happens and it's just it's like I said, it's like a wonderful, magical thing that happens.  How did that come about for your two operations to work together? How did that happen?

00:06:47 Pilar Gray

Well, this started back in 2006 when I started in this district. We had a school garden at two of our elementary sites at HOV Garden. There was none of our middle school and none of our high school. Well, the school gardens really expanded me as an educator and now a nutrition director because as you've already mentioned. We'll put the food if  you grow the food. Then they're gonna wanna eat it. An entire process. So, you know, I really wanted to garden it every school site. Well, one day a woman named Susan Lightfoot walk into my office. And she asked me about wanting to start a school garden at the high school.

00:07:28 Rick

What happened?

00:07:29 Pilar Gray

She and two other women, Kat Cassenberger and Kim Morgan were sitting around one day wanted to do something great for the community and I thought was well. Let's do something around a community garden. They wanted to build a community garden, so they started looking for land. And they started planning the direction of the school district after talking to the number of people 'cause, we had an old agriculture department that had not been used in years. So it was just kind of sitting there and disrepair the buildings dilapidated. The garden was a field of weeds, you know, like 5 feet tall.  Was just nothing happening. So we thought, well, maybe you could use that space. And my Superintendent, the time, Steve Long, was very supportive of it. He asked me. Well, what do you think? I said, well, they do it.  They grow food for the school meals. So they did. They came in with entire volunteer base at the beginning and everyone got out there and just revived the physical environment. Turned it into a working form. We're able for regional occupational program funding at the time. An organic guard class at the high school. And so we got the kids in there growing. That was going into. And the entire time you. The nonprofit developed and has steak stuck with it. So that was the beginning of the 5th course in our relationship.

00:08:47 Michelle

And I kind of remember that actually, now that I'm thinking about it, wasn't it around like 2005, 2006, 2007.  It was like close to 20 years ago. You know?  Yeah, OK 2006.

00:08:56 Pilar Gray

2006? Yep.

00:09:01 Rick

So how can we get that to happen in your place?

00:09:01 Beth Horkman

Yeah, yeah.

00:09:04 Rick

Why isn't there a farm in every school district across the country? What was so special were that, I mean, if we could bottle this and sell it, we would, right? You know it's like our dream. I wonder, and I don't know. You don't have to have an answer for that, but, well, I think the answer is passionate people. If this works. Like people who care, people who are.. to go above and beyond the basic necessities of their work, you know, this is this is this work of love.

00:09:36 Rick

Yes. Well, and the more we talk about it and hence this is one of the reasons why Michelle and I created this program to get the word out there. And so baby steps, right, we just.. it’s a lot of people don't even know it's an option that we do this in schools. We can grow food for our kids, you know, in a meaningful way.

00:09:56 Michelle

What's one thing you want everyone to know about the work you're doing?

00:10:01 Beth Horkman

I think that it's very impactful on students and then the community.

00:10:05 Beth Horkman

It's a gathering spot and I think. A Community Garden, a school garden that really just brings it into clear vision of what's important and what's important is, you know, controlling our local food systems and food sovereignty and teaching this, you know the youths.

00:10:34 Rick

You mentioned the community. How do you get the word out? How do you get the community to know about what you're doing there?

00:10:42 Beth Horkman

Well, each year around Earth day, we do our Earth Day festival. One of the largest on the North Coast. Last year we had a 1200 participants come, people come through.  A free family event. We have over last year 36 local nonprofits doing arts, family, kid activities and representation of their work, live music and food, and just different workshops on such as restoring an ecosystem. And then we're known that things in an understanding of the work we do and then all the parents and students attend these, the school district schools are aware of us and the food that we bringing into the cafeterias.

00:11:35 Michelle

And being close to the coast, I'm just curious, are you able to bring seafood into your schools?

00:11:42 Pilar Gray

In March we’re bringing back a fish to school program here at Fort Bragg unified. We did one years ago with the Fort Bragg grounds, this association where we were able to get bycatch, which you're not familiar with, that when they go for ground fish, they often collect species they didn't intend to, but often just get tossed back. And so. But a lot of them perfectly edible. Nothing wrong with it, it's just not very marketable. So we're able to purchase that through, you know, rock bottom price for number years. And we had to stop because of some severe fish allergies. We had a family of kids that couldn't be in a building while it was cooking. It was an awful thing, but we stopped and, well, a number of years have passed. Those kids have grown on, and so we're starting again. This time, the partnership with the Noyer Harbor District. So we're going to get local fish right out of Harbor Island starting at school.

00:12:46 Michelle

And what kind of and how are you serving that?

00:12:50 Pilar Gray

The most popular ways is fish and chips. We do not fry anything. It's all oven baked, but we've got a way of doing it so it marks a fry very well and it comes out crispy crunchy, you know, coating and with oven baked nice and golden brown.  fish tacos they like, and we're going to… maybe some other new recipes, but those go to favorites and the ones the kids seem to prefer.

00:13:15 Michelle

Yeah. And when you mentioned you do it in partnership with others, what role do your partners play in bringing something like that to the students?

00:13:23 Pilar Gray

For us, you know, making the connections to the Fisher people down the harbor and then getting it to our processors and then getting it into delivering it to us. We're helping with the procurement delivery. And also what we're going to be doing this year, which is particularly exciting, is education for our students, which we did was missing geese last time, and it's such important piece. So they're going to bring in our harbor. Master Anna, she's going to come and she's going to bring some other Fisher people to come talk to his kids in classes.  About our harbor, what it does, what it means to what the fishing industry is all about. Why it's important to do sustainable fishing and health benefits of eating fish and hey, kids, go eat at the cafeteria. Very exciting.

00:14:16 Michelle

So you're bringing Fisher people into the classrooms and then they're having experience to taste and try the food?  How does that compare to what you're doing with the food forest. Do students go out there or does the farm come into the school? Paint us a picture of the practicalities of partnering together.

00:14:41 Pilar Gray

Beth, do you want to take that? Or do you want me to?

00:14:43 Beth Horkman

I can take it, yeah. Well, how right now through the really sweet, we secured a garden educator here at Nova Food for us. In the past, we've had garden educators, but through funding, it hasn't proven itself to be sustainable, but. We've had our garden educator, Katie, with us now for quite some time, did our summer internship program and now she's working clear technical education classes at the high school.  We secured her position through the funding, the CDFA grant we wrote in her position to pay for this important piece of the puzzle with school to Garden school to Farm to School under score program so we have students coming in the garden and she's also going to their classrooms, teaching horticulture and soil chemistry and regenerative practices that we do in the garden.

00:15:50 Pilar Gray

And it's on a also on the school district, we have a full time garden educator, Iris who operates and teaches of both for elementary school. She takes care of those two gardens and provide garden classes to everyone of the students there.  We have a farm now also with middle school and farm to table class there and an ag teacher for a technical education ag teacher and that's a senior program to our high school AG and FFA department. We also have in high school ag teacher there,  horticulture. So we have and those students there also work with the food forest. They go into the garden over there as well. We're integrating over programs.

00:16:33 Rick

So this and this program is at it's on the high school campuses. This program just for that grade level or do the other grades get to take advantage of this as well?

00:16:46 Pilar Gray

Every school has its own garden that they can participate in. But we have students going over to the high school farm as well alternative education. That particular one brings kids over a bit. One of our elementary schools is directly across the street from High school. Both easy for teachers to take their kids over there to see the farm, and sometimes our elementary garden teacher will make it part of her class to take the students over there and sometimes annual food for itself will just host, you know an event there for the children to come over and participate in.

00:17:17 Michelle

So I'm just trying to think how does it fit into the school day because this is so amazing. That you were in classroom teacher. Educator. Because you know, there's some limited bell time, right? The time students have for different things. And so how is the garden time and food forest time framed?  Is it math? Is it character development?

00:17:47 Beth Horkman

Umm. Well Katie, our garden educator worked directly with the school. They do cuts and meetings ahead of time, and sometimes Katie will go over to the Ag Department and teach classes there. If the students are coming into the garden, it is a short, short walk. We're literally on campus and Fort Bragg High School is an open campus concept. Students are walking outside to different classrooms already. And yeah, it takes some planning, but you're right. I think both schedules too, that they're very short. These classes, right? Right. 47 minutes. But yeah, it's a good planning and talk through. Since to be planned and getting active.

00:18:36 Pilar Gray

The beauty of garden enhanced nutrition education is that it's you can apply it to just about any curriculum object you got your science in there, you can go out there. You can do literature. You can do history, you can do nutrition education, of course, which is important to kids. So there's art. You really make a connections out there. We also have a harvest of the month program here at the district and the educational materials that come with that all have state standard based lessons attached to it around a produce item of the month, whatever it happens to be. This month is dry beans, for example. So you know, it's quite easy to get out in the garden, meet your curriculum needs, and it's also just good for, you know, social emotional learning. And we have for the elementary is just logistically, it's built into their schedule different pull out times I guess you would call it..  well, it's garden. You go to the garden, maybe the next week. It's music or something else, so it's just one of those classes. And so the classrooms, it's, it's, it's built into their schedule.

00:19:45 Michelle

You mentioned social. I mean, that's really unique actually. Social emotional learning. Do you work with school counselors at all?

00:19:57 Pilar Gray

We have school counselors. I don't necessarily personally work with them, but they have them.

00:20:04 Beth Horkman

I use the resources of school counsellors to work with students to get into a summer internship program, and they've helped us with interviewing processing for students to come over the summer and do an internship in the garden. So I worked with counsellors in that in that degree.

00:20:25 Michelle

Also, more in the career counseling capacity a school counselor, because they do lots of things, but one of them is career counseling. So interesting.

00:20:33 Rick

And so for you to wrap this up, we're thinking we like to ask you what do you see the future for your work and maybe like if you have an unlimited budget, what would you do next? Would you just stay the course doing what you're doing now, would you expand,  what next? It's like a blank check for you guys, so you can think of anything.

00:20:53 Beth Horkman

Well, we're really excited to have secured the garden educator position and to help the agriculture teachers and teachers horticulture and regenerative practice farming practices. And we really are wanting to produce more food, more food for the school cafeteria systems. We're mainly in the high school, but we want to get more into the middle school and more into. The grade schools as well. And the CDFA grant that we were awarded really helped us being able to put in more efficient methods and better equipment and bigger greenhouse to be able to produce more food. 

We're, you know, we're growing a really strong working relationship between our non profit partner Benioff Forest, our districts revive Agriculture department and FFA programs our culinary arts department.. You know, school nutrition services between the teachers keep building those relationships so sustainable. I'm a huge fan of students growing food that they eat in their school. It just win on every level and both annoying food for us and for bragging about school district each received separate California Department of Food and Agriculture grants this year to support or expand our farm to school work here. You know, we've been doing this for decades, or, you know, we're a proven model here.  And so a good portion that could use to improve our infrastructure. You know, since we have been doing it for decades, a lot of stuff needs repair at the time and to bring in some equipment and other things to our efficiency, so that we can produce more and get more food into school meals.

00:22:41 Rick

Yeah. I saw you had a wish list on your on your website, which we'll leave a link to your website under show notes, but you need you need some gates I saw and things…

00:23:02 Beth Horkman

Yeah, definitely. That hasn't been updated for a little bit, but our wish list stuff we had a extensive wish list with supplies through our grant writing. But yeah, no, we could definitely use some gates in certain areas and all these improvements infrastructure 100%.

00:23:22 Michelle

Well, we're huge fans of kids growing food that they eat in the cafeteria, and I'm just so grateful for the incredible work you both do in making happy, healthy kids. Yeah. Thank you.

00:23:31 Beth Horkman

Thank you.

00:23:34 Pilar Gray

Thank you for your interest and for getting the word out to the people.

00:23:37 Pilar Gray

It should be the norm.

00:23:39 Beth Horkman

100%.

00:23:42 Rick

OK. Thank you guys so much. We'd like to thank everybody for listening today. Farm to school was written, directed and produced by Rick Sherman and Michelle Markesteyn with the help from Leann Locker of Oregon State University, and was made possible by a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture.

00:24:00 Michelle

The content and ideas of the farm to school podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Oregon State University, Oregon Department of Education, and the United States Department of Agriculture. The USDA, Department of Ed and Oregon State University are equal opportunity providers and employers.

00:24:16 Rick

Do you want to learn more about Farm to school? Check out other episodes, show notes, contact information and much more by searching farm to school podcast, OSU.

00:24:26 Michelle

Yeah. We’d really love to hear from you, so please stop by OSU Farm to school podcast.

00:24:31 Rick

And we'd love to hear from you. And please, if you have an idea for a future podcast, let us know.

00:24:37 Michelle

Sure. We hear from lots of ideas.. That's how we find new people like Beth and Pilar. Thank you both so much for being here!

00:24:42 Rick

Thank you, Beth and Pilar, for being on the show.

00:24:45 Beth Horkman

Thank you.

00:24:46 Beth Horkman

Had a great time.

00:24:46 Beth Horkman

Yeah.

00:24:48 Pilar Gray

Thank you for having us.