MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Lawmakers in Louisiana are asking Congress to bring back a federal program that helped schools buy food from local farms. It's one of the cuts the Trump administration made to the Department of Agriculture. Member station WWNO's Aubri Juhasz explains how one school district spent the money before they lost funding.
(CROSSTALK)
AUBRI JUHASZ, BYLINE: It's lunchtime at Northwestern Elementary outside Baton Rouge. Bianca Coats, the supervisor of school nutrition, says the kids love anything with beef.
BIANCA COATS: A fan favorite is beefaroni. Beefy nacho day is, like, an all-time favorite across the district. We also do the homemade meatloaf.
JUHASZ: Coats has used two federal programs to buy beef for Zachary Community Schools, which includes Northwestern Elementary. The first provides discount food to schools. The second was a farm-to-school grant. She used that to buy local, grass-fed beef.
COATS: You can tell that the grass-fed beef is much leaner. It doesn't have as much fat in it.
JUHASZ: That beef comes from a small, family-owned farm less than an hour away - Muse 3 Farm in Greensburg.
(SOUNDBITE OF COWS MOOING)
JUHASZ: On a windy day, dozens of cows are grazing on rye grass.
CHRIS MUSE: As long as we have grass, we are happy.
JUHASZ: Chris Muse founded the farm with his three brothers. They started selling their high-quality meat at farmers' markets and to restaurants. Muse wanted to sell to schools too.
MUSE: Kids going to eat every day at those schools, right? And you would think, OK, well, where are most of their food coming from? Is it coming locally, you know? And the reality is, no.
JUHASZ: In the most recent farm-to-school census in 2023, only half of Louisiana's schools reported serving any local food. The problem is cost. Muse's premium grass-fed beef is $10 a pound. That discount beef schools buy - that's $4 a pound. That's where the grant program came in. It launched a few years ago under the Biden administration to give schools federal funding they could only spend on local food - produce, meat, rice. When he heard about it, Muse remembers thinking...
MUSE: This is what I have been waiting on.
JUHASZ: Suddenly, schools had the money to buy his beef.
MUSE: They were calling me now, said, hey, OK, we're ready. We're ready. What can you do? What can you do?
JUHASZ: He says demand was so high, he had to turn some schools away. He got other farmers involved in the program and planned to expand his operations. But then the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, started making cuts. More than half a billion for schools to buy food from farms disappeared. The Department of Agriculture says the program was no longer in line with the agency's goals. Without that money, Coats with Zachary Schools says she can't afford to buy local beef. Muse, the farmer, says he's heard the same from all his schools. Marlene Schwartz researches food policy at the University of Connecticut. She says it's unfair to expect schools to be able to buy food directly from farms without government support.
MARLENE SCHWARTZ: To sort of simultaneously, you know, get the best price and have the highest quality, that unfortunately, in our food system in the United States, that's just not the way it works.
JUHASZ: Back on the farm, Chris Muse says he hopes the Trump administration will realize they've made a mistake.
MUSE: I'm optimistic that once things settle down and we reorganize and re-restructure things, I feel that that program is one of the programs that's going to come back.
JUHASZ: Some Republican lawmakers in Louisiana are pushing Congress to restore the funding. They say they support the Trump administration's plans to make America healthy again and argue you can't get healthier than farm fresh. For NPR News, I'm Aubri Juhasz outside Baton Rouge.
(SOUNDBITE OF DUSTIN TEBBUTT'S "(IN.) FADING LIGHT") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
