It is essential to place Farm to School and Preschool programs in the context of deeply sustainable healthy local foodsheds.
In our recent HCFS report, The Promise of Farm to Preschool in Southwest Colorado, we made the argument that such programs must include the whole community and are ultimately dependent on a healthy local food system. I would further propose that it is both instructive and essential to think of these efforts in the context of healthy local foodsheds—a more tangible concept than the “food system” and one that additionally emphasizes the importance of the whole local landscape and its inhabitants—human and otherwise—to our food production endeavors.
We at HCFS are increasingly looking at all our local food work in terms of the healthy local foodshed—that area to which we should look first for our food, and that area we should feel most responsible for. Local foodsheds present both an opportunity and a responsibility, greatest at the local level, but extending out to neighboring local and regional foodsheds. Our work on connecting food, climate, and biodiversity drives us to champion the importance of deeply sustainable healthy local food systems on the environmental level, in addition to the social and economic levels.
Farm to School and Preschool programs require this context in order to achieve all their associated benefits over the long term—healthy food, kids, local economies, the environment, and communities. The only way to ensure that the food served our children is of the very highest quality is if the soil and ecosystem it is grown in is the healthiest possible. The only way those producers can stay in business is if the land is healthy, resilient, and regenerated over the long term—and if the landscape surrounding those farms and ranches is healthy as well. The only way our children will have a good world to grow up in is if we care for these whole landscapes in deeply sustainable terms.
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