GOSHEN COUNTY – On Wednesday, Goshen County School District held their Farm to School Day. The staff and students ate locally raised and butchered beef donated to the district by community members. 

The Farm to School Day is not a new thing. Schools around the state have implemented this Wyoming Department of Education (WDE) program in other schools. This year, Food Service Director Ramona Moody, asked for the WDE to attend a school board meeting to push for the program to be implemented here. The district started looking for donations and everything fell into place. 

Previous to this, another school donated a patty maker to the district, and it came in handy. Goshen County kitchen staff made approximately 1,746 patties for Wyoming Farm to School Day. 

Despite making so many patties, the district still has quite a bit of beef left over which they will be able to use for future lunches. 

Another great benefit of the day was how not only students got their meals for free, but staff were also invited to participate in the meal for no charge. They found it rather important to have the staff involved. Not all of the students will understand how valuable it is to get to eat local beef for lunch, but the staff certainly did. 

Even though some of the students didn’t fully understand, there were still so many smiling faces at lunchtime. Lunch looked great and the students were incredibly happy to eat it. 

Moody also added how she would like to take this further than just beef. She would like to find other locally grown foods for her to implement into lunchtime. 

“We don’t live in an area where a lot of stuff can be brought from the farm to the school, but I can try to come up with new ideas and new things so we can do it. Beef would probably be the easiest thing for us to do, in the community that we live in, but there are definitely other opportunities that I’m going to continue to look at and explore as I can, for other opportunities maybe bringing some other farm to school in as well,” Moody shared. 

The district really wanted to get the kids involved and excited about this as much as possible. For this reason, they also held an art contest. Students made drawings for the event. They put together a judging committee for the contest. The winner’s art was chosen to be put on the advertising posters and on t-shirts the staff wore for the event. Winning students also received a few prizes from the WDE including the T-shirts they helped design. 

The event went really well. So many people ate the burgers, and they enjoyed knowing their meal came from people they might even know, Moody explained.

“We were pretty excited to be able to participate in the program this year and we just wanted to kind of promote it and let the community know that it’s out there and that the opportunities are there. And like I said, we were very excited, the donations that we received were huge and absolutely the reason we were able to do it is because we received those donations of the three beef. And then also, on the processing as well, so the donors, I can’t thank them enough for what they did to help implement this and bring it because that’s huge for the school district. And so, I just wanted to again, reiterate how important it was that I can thank the donors for what they did for us,” Moody added as a final note.

Moody said she thinks this is the first Wyoming Farm to School Day for Goshen County School District. She was excited to participate this year.