Two candidates running for statewide office are calling for a majority of the food served in Iowa schools to be raised in Iowa.
Zach Lahn, the Republican candidate for governor, said it’s about creating new markets to give farmers an “off-ramp” to raise other commodities. “I would like to see a time in which 80% of the food served in Iowa’s public schools is grown in the state of Iowa,” Lahn said. “That will take time, but think about what that would do to our rural communities in terms of life, having more young people on the farm working animals because the biggest opportunity is going to be in protein and that requires people and if we have the market to support it, that means more people in our rural communities, and we can start to see more vibrant farms in rural communities.”
Lahn, the Republican candidate for governor, is also calling for a change in the regulations for USDA’s Farm-to-School grants. “Right now if you’re selling food into a public school and your growing beef, for instance, you have to be able to deliver 40,000 pounds at a time,” Lahn said. “It’s just not practical for a small family farm.”
Chris Jones, the Democrat running for State Agriculture Secretary, said the state should set a goal of having half of the food served in Iowa schools come from Iowa farms within 10 years. Jones proposes a $10-million–a-year program to provide an “off-ramp” to farmers who want to raise healthy food. “We have given gas stations in Iowa $70 million to put in gas pumps just for E15 and E10, so we ought to be able to get local foods for $10 million for,” Jones said. “We ought to be able to have our school children eating healthy food.”
Jones said school cafeterias serve nearly 80 million meals each school year and Iowans will spend $93 billion on groceries this year — but 97% of the food eaten here is imported. “We hear the industry now and we hear Farm Bureau over here saying: ‘We feed the world.’ Well, we don’t even feed Polk County,” Jones said. “If we’re going to feed the world, we need to feed Iowa first.”
Raising food for human consumption will also revive rural communities, according to Jones. “We need to restore some diversity in agriculture,” Jones said. “All this consolidation in our agricultural system where we focus on just two crops, we only have a small set of farmers raising livestock, 70% of our corn goes to ethanol — this has not brought prosperity to rural Iowa. In fact, I would suggest it has almost destroyed rural Iowa.” Jones often says a diversity of crops, like fruits and vegetables, and restoring pastures to rebuild Iowa’s cattle industry will improve Iowa’s water quality, too.
