Toni Jackson, the school nutrition director for Trimble County Public Schools is gearing up for one of the small northern Kentucky district’s biggest events of the year. The school will grill about 1,200 burgers over the course of three hours.
“This whole town will smell like grilled burgers that day, like you cannot drive through Bedford without smelling burgers,” Jackson said.
And this is local beef, cooked by volunteers from the Kentucky Cattlemen’s Association.
Jackson is proud of the progress her district, and others around Kentucky, have made toward introducing more scratch cooking and local produce into their school lunches. One of the recent programs that encouraged such cooperation was the Local Food in Schools cooperative agreement program, which first awarded funds in 2022. Kentucky received $3.2 million.
Applications had already opened for the next pot of $660 million dollars over the next three years when the program was abruptly cancelled.
“We were supposed to receive another round this school year, and it kept getting pushed back and pushed back and pushed back, and then you're not getting it at all,” Jackson said.
A similar program, that provided funds for food banks to buy local produce, was also cancelled. The now-scrapped Local Food Purchase Agreement Program would have provided $5.9 million to Kentucky farmers over the next three years, according to a spokesperson for the Kentucky Department of Agriculture. Both are run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, through which school lunch funding in general is distributed.
In the letter canceling the grant program last month, USDA officials said the program no longer matches agency priorities. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins told Fox News they were COVID-era programs.
“As we have always said, if we are making mistakes, we will own those mistakes and we will reconfigure,” Rollins said. “But right now, from what we are viewing, that program was non-essential, that it was a new program, and it was an effort by the left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that were not necessary.”
‘I might have to trash it’
One county away, in Henry, David Neville walked through his hydroponic greenhouse, containing rows of vibrant green and purple lettuce. Neville said some people laughed at the idea of scalable hydroponic lettuce, but he wanted to prove that it can work and be profitable.
Neville started the project based on conversations with local schools. He said supply chain issues, California droughts, and Florida labor shortages had schools looking local for produce.
“USDA mandates color on the plate, so no Iceberg lettuce. They ain't got no color, right? So dark leafy greens.”
Neville’s lettuce is already out for students in a few school districts, including Trimble County. A bright yellow sign on the salad bar proclaims the lettuce was harvested two days before.
But Neville said he’s already feeling the effects of the federal cuts. He pointed out a section of lettuce that’s still a vibrant green.
“Essentially, this is done. I might have to trash it, because we geared up to market under the prospect of LFS and LFPA and other current funds as well,” Neville said. “This is a direct relationship for the freeze and the future cancellation of those programs.”
Neville said some farmers are already shifting away from working with schools, worried about the instability of funding. Stability — knowing who is buying crops and when— is key to farming.
“I'm fortunate that this is not my whole livelihood,” Neville said, gesturing toward his hydroponic setup. “I'll have a little waste, and I had to donate, already did donate, like, 700 pounds.”
Fearing future cuts
Jackson, with Trimble County schools, said she’s worked hard to push back against the “garbage school lunch” stereotype, and that takes investing in them.
“Here in our community, in our district at Trimble County, where we are able to provide the students with these quality meals, the perspective in this county on school lunch has changed,” Jackson said. “We get a lot of lot of students who will tell them ‘You cook better than my mom.’”
Jackson said that, historically, frustration with school meal quality leads to calls for cutting funding rather than investing more. Paying just 3 cents more for higher quality produce — and thus meals — adds up quickly, she said.
“It could cost us thousands of dollars over the course of a year. We have to manage the entire program, our staff, HR, everything has to come from those reimbursable meals,” Jackson said. “In a lot of ways, you've got to cut costs to maintain.”
Jackson said it has the added benefit of supporting local farmers and producers.
“With everything going on, it's going to take a lot of nickel and diming and some hard decisions on how we are going to continue to offer the same quality of meals,” Jackson said.
Jackson’s also afraid that the Trump administration could change eligibility for universal free school meal programs or lower the reimbursement rate for some students. The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) allows the country’s highest poverty districts to serve breakfast and lunch at no cost to all enrolled students without collecting household applications. Schools are then reimbursed using a formula based on their participation in other specific means-tested programs, like SNAP.
One proposal that Republican lawmakers are considering would dramatically increase the share of students who need to be enrolled in aid programs in order to qualify for CEP. If adopted, the proposal would affect more than half of all Kentucky students, according to a Chalkbeat analysis.
John Edwards, a local butcher who works with Trimble County schools, said he knows buying local isn’t easy, especially with all the regulations that the USDA puts around school meals.
“I know going local, and I think everybody would agree about this, is not the cheapest option. It's not the easiest option either,” Edwards said. “What's easy is making a phone call to one truck that's going to deliver everything you need. But is that the best option? Probably not.”
Edwards said when supply chains failed and sourcing food got tough during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, local producers like him were there. With the fresh funding, schools had an incentive to reach out to people like him.
But he’s already seeing less outreach from school districts in the last couple months.
“They need the encouragement, and that includes the funding in order to do it, to purchase local,” Edwards said.
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
