Celebrating Farmers and Ranchers

I'm Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

Since 2010 Taste Washington Day has helped thousands of Washington students connect with local farmers and ranchers to understand where their food comes from. Kaye Wetli, president of the Washington School Nutrition Association says that the students in her school district are really looking forward to Taste Washington Day on October 1.

WETLI: They just love it. We have participated for probably around five years now, and so I do some promotion ahead of time within our district and market it on the menus so the kids know to look forward to it. What we do, which makes it really cool for Riverview School District, is we have it on the salad bar so the students that purchase lunch that day have the opportunity to have the fresh fruits and vegetables that we're serving, but then we also have samples. We bring in the FFA students and then they go to all of the lunch rooms and hand out samples to the other students in the lunch room, so it's all inclusive. That's really fun to be able to tie in the older kids at the high school level to be able to share their knowledge of local produce and farming with the younger students.

Wetli says she gets in roughly 350 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables from the local farmers.

WETLI: Which I usually am out at 6:00 in the morning at the various farms picking it up, and then I end up back at the high school and the FFA students and the horticulture class students come in throughout the day and help me prepare all that - washing, slicing, and then bagging it up so that it can be sent out to the various schools.

Wetli will be back on Monday to talk about how one of the local farmers there has become a real celebrity with the kids.

That's Washington Ag Today.

I'm Lacy Gray on the Ag Information Network.