Non Technical Summary
Through the Creating a Circular School Food Systems project the Rio School District will be able to identify the needs to help minimize the food waste coming from the school meals program as well as provide uneaten items to the larger community. The Rio School Distict will be able to learn from local partners how to establish and maintain a composting system andtea brewering system to add organic materials back to the soil. This will help to create healthy soil at the school district farm and schools gardens. Through healthy soil the district will be able to not only grow healthy crops but also a healthy community that is educated in the importance of consuming whole foods as well as the proper diversion of their food waste that can then be turned back into healthy food for our soil. Thus educating the community on how to create and maintain their own circular food system.
Animal Health Component
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Research Effort Categories
Basic
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Applied
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Developmental
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Goals / Objectives
The main goal of this project is to reduce the volume of food waste from the source. Aspreviously stated, the district conservatively produces 550,000 pounds of food waste everyschool year. The objective of this grant would be to get a more accurate baseline number in thefirst quarter of the grant. The rest of year one will be working to reduce this by 10% and in yeartwo reduce this number by 20%. Rio School District participates in the School BreakfastProgram and the National School Lunch Program. These programs regulate the amount of foodeach student is served to ensure that they get adequate nutrition. For example, elementary andmiddle school students must take 3⁄4 cups of vegetables per day. There is no requirement that thestudent must eat this food however, and approximately 50% of children do not eat therecommended amount of vegetables. Inevitably some of this food lands in the organic waste bin.The Nutrition Services Department within the district is doing its part to change this fact byteaching nutrition education, supporting school gardens, and increasing scratch cooking. Thisgrant will help the district properly evaluate what items are not being consumed and makeadjustments accordingly to the menu to reduce food waste in the first place. Child and NutritionServices main goal is to ensure that these healthy meals are as palatable as possible so that they are being enjoyed and consumed by the students. This has the potential to have positive economic benefits by saving money in food and labor costs. The second goal is to feed hungry people. After students have finished eating, they are able place packaged foods, whole fruits and unopened milk on the share table. This food is left on the share table for two hours or less. After this, it is temperature checked and if it is acceptable can be reused the next day. For this goal, the district will partner with Saticoy Food Hub, a non-profit organization located in Saticoy, California which is an unincorporated area of Ventura County and located less than 10 miles from the school district. For over a decade, Saticoy has been designated by the USDA as a low-income, low-access census-tract, otherwise known as a food desert. Saticoy Food Hub is dedicated to serving its community by expanding food access to the residents of Saticoy and its surrounding neighborhoods. Comprehensively, Saticoy Food Hub creates programming and services to combat food apartheid for Saticoy's unhoused, undocumented, kitchenless, senior, low-income, and BIPOC community members, as well as serving multi-family and multi-generational households. Saticoy Food Hub is sustained through its community volunteers who allow the organization to carry out its mission of creating equitable economic opportunities for food producers, while increasing access to fresh, local food for community members. In order to address local food accessibility needs within the community, Saticoy Food Hub established Saticoy Farmers Market and Saticoy Community Fridge, two programs prioritizing community building, mutual aid, and food justice. Finally, during classroom field trips to the farm students feed their uneaten food to the chickens, goats and ducks at the farm. The third goal is to create nutrient rich compost for school gardens, the district farm, and the surrounding community. As a result of increasing scratch cooking, the school's kitchens are now producing more organic matter. This project would allow for the kitchens to have small scale industrial composters in a pilot kitchen. Composting this way will lower the amount of methane that is produced by food waste going to landfills. This compost will then be utilized in school gardens. One of the best approaches to tackling climate change is teaching citizens how to be good stewards of the planet. We educate students on composting, native plants and animals, and organic gardening/farming. The majority of the organic matter that is separated in the cafeteria will be collected by our partners E.J Harrison and composted by Agromin. This compost will then be delivered back to our 10-acre farm. This grant would allow us to purchase a compost spreader for our tractor to make this work efficient. The objective would be to apply approximately 5-8 tons of compost per acre per year. The farm serves as a foundation to uplift a community that has experienced racial inequity and environmental injustice. This project educates underserved communities how to be entrepreneurs when it comes to developing businesses that will help avert the worst effects of climate change.
Project Methods
The first activity to meet the objective of reducing the source of food waste by 20% by the close of the grant is to conduct a district wide food waste audit. This is to determine accurate data on how much food is being wasted by providing a benchmark. These would take place in the first quarter (February-April) of the grant. The procedure for this would be to partner with a local non-profit, Once Upon a Watershed, whose director has over 25 years of experience educating students about composting. The procedure for this is that Once Upon a Watershed will spend ten hours at each school site conducting the audit. The audit will collect data on the average amount of ounces of edible food waste that is left on the student's tray after they are done eating. During the summer (May-July), food and nutrition services will identify the best methods of intervention in encouraging the students to eat more of what they take. The nutrition education team will implement these interventions in the fall (August-December). There will then be a second round of waste audits conducting in the Spring (February-April) of 2026. This this activity will address the segments of consumers and food preparation in the food chain by gathering insights into why particular items are being thrown out in the first place and making adjustments so that they are more palatable. Simultaneously, Child and Nutrition Services will work with the custodial staff on another novel approach of assessing the cause of food waste. California passed a law, Senate Bill 1383, that aims to reduce the amount of organic waste that is sent to landfills. In view of this legislation, students are already separating their organic waste in the cafeteria. The custodial staff can help gather key data on what menu items the students are consuming or throwing out the most. The process will be straight forward. The custodial staff will have a sheet where they mark how many bins of organic matter they collect each day from the cafeteria. This will be matched to the entree of the day, and any occurrence of a lot of waste for a particular item will receive attention. The recipe for the entre will either be adjusted and tested with students or potentially not served again. The second activity and procedure for working with Saticoy Food Hub to salvage edible food that would otherwise be discarded will be conducted as a pilot. This is something new that the district would be trying so there will need to be some experimentation as so what works the best for both organizations. To start, Saticoy Food Hub will visit school sites once a month to pick up food that has not been taken from the share table towards the end of the school day 4:00 PM after supper. The barriers to this are economical and logistical. First, Saticoy Food Hub must provide an employee and vehicle to pick-up this donated produce. This type of activity fits within their mission, but long-term it will be important to consider the financial sustainability of this activity. Further, it isn't a set amount of food collected at each site so this will require extra communication and logistical coordination. This pilot will start small and rely on good communication so that the pickups will eventually be more frequent. Ultimately, this food will make it out to the community so encompasses the segment of consumers in the food chain.The third activity will be to purchase a Reencle Commercial Composter from Jeden Bio that has the capacity to compost 66 lbs of food waste a day. Through the funds of the grant, we will also purchase an IMC Waste Station from the Food Waste Experts. These will be housed at Rio Lindo where the cafeteria staff will use the waste station to breakdown food waste before adding it to the Reencle Commercial Composter. The resulting compost will be applied to the school gardens. Activity four is to purchase a 320MS MultiSpread Compost Spreader from Earth and Turf for the farm. This will be used to apply 5-8 tons per acre per year. We will also purchase a Geo Tea Compost Tea Brewer Dome with Discharge Pump and 12" Extractor Dome to create a Liquid compost brewing system for the farm, and a continuous flow vermicompost bin. This will create a fertility center that will be used to improve soil quality, educate students about sustainability, and provide compost and compost tea for the school community.