Farm-to-School Month Brings Celebration & Education From Field to Classroom
At the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food (UDAF), farm-to-school specialist Natalie McHale has been gearing up for a busy season.
“As soon as school starts again, it’s full steam ahead every year,” she says, taking a minute away from calls with the Utah State Board of Education (USBE) and various local food distributors. “You know, fall is harvest season too, so it’s the best time to do farm education activities with students.”
The one she and the farm-to-school team at USBE are working on right now is the upcoming Apple Crunch Day, a day where schools are invited to find locally-grown apples for students to try and talk to the kids about where their food comes from. Apple Crunch Day 2026 started in 2017, and has been a flagship event for UDAF and USBE’s joint efforts to build a more robust farm-to-school program and increase support for getting local food into schools.
“There’s more than one function of the program,” McHale says. “We work directly with a lot of producers and school food specialists, but a big part of what we have to do is just raise awareness and let people know that it’s even an option, and that it’s important.”
That’s why this year, the Farm to School program pursued a declaration from Governor Spencer Cox to make October Farm to School Month in Utah. Governor Cox signed the declaration on Tuesday, October 6, 2026, officially kicking off a month of education and celebration of local food in schools.
The Farm to School program has plans to promote and expand during Farm to School Month. As part of Apple Crunch Day, they run an event for some elementary school classes at the Utah State Capitol building, where they can try local apples and meet the farmers that grow them. In late October, Dairy West will partner on a field trip for second graders from Voyage Academy in Ogden, who will also spend a school week learning about dairy farms, participating in farm-themed games, and taste-testing dairy products from Gossner Foods.
Another unique plan this October is that USBE has opened applications for Utah food producers to secure the state contracts that allow schools to purchase from them as vendors in the state purchasing system, which is a huge opportunity for agricultural producers, if they’re ready to grow.
“Something we like to say is that schools are the biggest restaurant in the country,” McHale says with a smile. “Every kid has to eat lunch every single day, right? It seems like a no-brainer to have local education and local agriculture supporting each other.”
The benefits of local food are plentiful, according to UDAF and their partners. Locally-grown food is often more nutritious, fresher, and uses up far less transportation & storage resources than food imported from other states or countries. Economically, farm to school initiatives keep significant amounts of money in local communities: just on Apple Crunch Day, participants in 2024 and 2025 spent a combined $189,090 on apples, with an estimated economic impact of $366,835.
“It’s so important to have a state that recognizes the impact of our program with something like this Farm to School Month declaration,” adds McHale. “The more connections we can make for schools and producers, the more kids will benefit too.”
To learn more about Utah’s farm-to-school program, visit farmtoschool.utah.gov.
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