Preschoolers introduced to local food and farms through simple classroom lessons

By: Michelle, Arlene

A student from Ayers’ classroom, D, tries cheese and  butter his class made from cream from Iowa dairies. 

When Christy Ayers, early childhood instructor at Southwest Valley Community School district, heard there was an opportunity to implement farm to early care teacher kits, she immediately knew she wanted to participate. Ayers was already doing a lot with STEM education and had implemented Iowaponics, a program that provides classrooms with aquaponics systems, where plants grow above a fish tank. She explains, “I'm really interested in teaching kids, especially at this young age, that we need farms, and that food doesn't just come from the store.” 

Farm to early care began in seven counties covered by Southern Iowa Resource Conservation & Development (RC&D) with the 2023-24 school year. Michelle Wilson, executive director, first learned about the farm to early care kits while she was participating in a training to become a farm to school coach. There was funding available from a statewide program, and she believed it could be a good match for her region. When Wilson became executive director in 2022, she canvassed the area to understand current needs. Southern Iowa RC&D employed a local food coordinator in the past, but it had been several years since they had done any local food work in the region. When canvassing she learned local food programming and coordination was a gap that her organization could once again fill. 

Ayers’ classroom is one of 14 that participated in the 2023-24 school year. Each month the classrooms would receive a kit which included a lesson plan, a recipe featuring a locally produced food, ingredients sourced from Iowa farms to make the recipe, and information about the farms that the ingredients were sourced from. “I really appreciated the lesson plans to guide you in cooking with the kids,” says Ayers. 

Wilson's role involved locating the farms each month from which to purchase the ingredients, assembling the kits, and delivering them to the sites. The most challenging aspect of the program was locating the locally sourced food, because not all could be located in the seven-county region. Therefore, Wilson often worked with Farm Table Procurement and Delivery, a food hub out of Harlan, to procure the food from another farm within the state of Iowa. 

Ayers’ favorite memory of the program thus far was when the featured food was radishes. They received ingredients to make a salad, which includes sliced radishes. One young student began eating the radish slices plain, one after another. Ayers describes, “So that little guy, he just started eating radish after radish after radish, and he loved it! His mom had no idea that he liked radishes.” 

The farm to ECE program is continuing in the 2024-25 school year with a slight reduction in the number of classrooms, using funds that were left over from the previous year. Funds from the larger statewide program were supplemented with funding from the Ringgold County chapter of the Iowa Corn Growers Association and a local women's philanthropy group, Creston CWC Wilson intends to raise funding locally to continue the program in future school years. 

Ayers looks forward to participating. She doesn't anticipate changing anything about the program. She shared that at the time of the interview, the latest teacher kit had just been delivered with apples from the Wallace Centers of Iowa Henry A. Wallace Farm. She says, “They don't look like apples from the grocery store. It's always fun to have those conversations with the kids explaining this is what an apple looks like when you pick it out of a tree. I like having those discussions, and I don't think we will change anything.”