Students Examine Links Between
Farm-to-School Program and Health

This year's Kerr Center essay contest directed the literary efforts of Oklahoma high school juniors and seniors to the topic, "Get Healthy with Oklahoma Farm-to-School."
The contest drew 113 entries from students in schools around the state. From that pool of contestants, an independent panel of judges selected four winners, to whom the Kerr Center awarded a total of $1,750 in cash prizes.
Excerpts from the winning essays are presented below. Read the full text of all winning essays online.

Drew Reese

First place
Farm-to-School

Connecting what we grow and what we eat is something Farm-to-School helps to do. It fills the gap between our harvest and our meals.

Kids have fun with this project and are pleased to participate. This process helps children better relate to how their food choices affect their own health, their family, and the local farmer.

The kids develop a better understanding of where and how their food is grown, while they help sustain the shrinking population of small farms. The program hopes to expand, to include more farmers, more Oklahoma-grown produce and more schools.

A statewide Farm-to-School program would do much for the future health of children and to revitalize Oklahoma's struggling rural communities.
Drew Reese, Nardin

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Meghan Gose

First Runner Up
Farm Fresh for Kids' Health

My grandparents grew up in an era where much of the food they ate was fresh from the farm. As a result the nutritional value of their food was much higher than the processed foods most kids eat today and the overall health of the people of their day was better.

The problem with the processed foods is that the milling process they go through removes virtually everything that's good for you, leaving only empty calories. Fresh foods still have the vitamins and minerals, which are so essential to growth and development in the human body.

The idea brought forth by the Farm-to-School Program to put produce directly from local farms onto local school lunch lines could assist greatly in changing the trend from the processed fast foods that are so prevalent on the menus of school lunchrooms today and damaging to children's health.
Meghan Gose, Thomas

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Jessica Warren

Honorable Mention
Get Healthy with Oklahoma Farm-to-School

The Farm-to-School program could be extremely beneficial to Oklahoma.

Most importantly, it would teach children about nutrition and provide them with an opportunity to eat healthier foods, which would help to slow down the rapidly rising obesity rates.

The Farm-to-School program would also teach kids about where the fresh fruits and vegetables that they are getting in school come from, and it would teach them about agriculture and how it affects Oklahoma's economy.
This program would be an amazing opportunity for Oklahomans. We just need to reach out and accept all of the good it can do for us.

Jessica Warren, Lamont

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Brady Brewer

Honorable Mention
Get Healthy with Oklahoma Farm-to-School
The old cliche that the children of today are the future of tomorrow is a perfect example of why Oklahoma public schools need the Farm-to-School program. This program has immense value and can help solve a variety of problems that plague today's society.

With obesity rates rising among school aged children, along with the sputtering economy in rural areas, this program could be a leap in the right direction for public schools, farmers, and the children who will benefit from the Farm-to-School program.

With the problem of the rising obesity rate among children and the fact that 85% of food choices in school vending machines are of poor nutritional value, the fact that the food from the program has high nutritional value is a major incentive for institutions to buy from Farm-to-School.

A person can easily see why Oklahoma and its public institutions need the Farm-to-School program. It can fight obesity in what is a very unhealthy world. It can fuel the economy, helping the small farmer become more profitable, also making the small rural community a more attractive place to raise a family.

Brady Brewer, Hunter

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