Agriculture students at North Stokes High School are growing lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers for the school cafeteria using a system that requires no soil.
“We’ve used that as an instructional tool for plant nutrition, because it’s very easy to see how nutrients affect plants in a hydroponic system,” teacher Ben Hall said.
Once the produce is harvested, it’s packed and sent just a few feet away to the school’s cafeteria for lunch.
“We’re very different than a school garden, which is for instructional purposes,” director of child nutrition Cindy Marion said. “Ours is for consumption purposes. I always say ‘we can’t feed 600 kids with 6 carrots,’ but we can grow the volume we need here for the school cafeteria.”
North Stokes High School is the only school in the country to grow Good Agricultural Practices certified produce. The school must go through an audit to ensure food safety from seed to table.
“It’s a product that we can harvest this morning, and it’s in the cafeteria actually minutes later, so the nutritional content of that is so important because it’s not coming on a truck 200 miles away,” Marion said.
The program is inspiring students to pursue a career in farming.
“I’d like to own my own greenhouse one day … be able to have a contract with maybe the government to create more food for urban populations,” student Nathaniel Southern said. “If you know how to grow food, you have knowledge for anything.”
