‘Field of Dreams’ in reverse: How an unused baseball diamond could become a farm for Live Oak School District

On a sunny spring day, Kelsey Perusse, the nutrition director for Live Oak School District, gazes out over an unused baseball field on the Del Mar Elementary School campus in Live Oak. Everything, from home plate to the outfield, is covered in a thick, verdant layer of ankle-high grass and curling fava beans. But Perusse doesn’t see an empty lot when she looks out over this corner of the campus, her back to a lively schoolyard. She sees a farm. 

The vision includes row crops of vegetables that would be used in the district’s central kitchen, located just across the playground, berry bushes, space for a tractor, an orchard with apple trees students could play under, beehives, and a play fort covered in purple-flowered wisteria vines. “I call this my ‘field of dreams,’” she says. 

Perusse is leading a team of passionate farmers and educators working to turn 1.1 acres of the school’s 2-acre baseball field into a nutrition and education farm. The space would both produce fruits and vegetables in quantities large enough to incorporate into the district’s nutrition program and be an agricultural education center for students.

A plan for the project has already been approved by the district and is currently seeking funding from outside donors. If it comes to fruition, it will be one of four school production farms in the state, joining Manteca Unified School District, Rio School District in Ventura County and Santa Clara Unified School District, where Perusse previously worked. 

Perusse was deeply inspired by her access to the 13-acre farm at SCUSD, where she was a dietician. She recalls enlightened moments with students like sitting in a field of corn while eating popcorn from corn that was grown at the farm, and insists that students were always more willing to try a new fruit or vegetable in the cafeteria if they knew it had been grown on site. 

Involving kids in the production of their food makes them more likely to eat it, she says: “By creating a space where it starts feeling more comfortable for kids, where they’re like, ‘I saw that grow! I picked that!’ Or, ‘I grew that, and then it went to my cafeteria!’ … it builds these connections that will last, hopefully, for a lifetime.”

When Perusse saw the vacant baseball field next to the school’s small garden, she and Jake Casarez, the district’s garden educator, hatched the idea to turn into a farm. If the project meets its funding goals, it could launch as early as the 2025-26 school year, she says. 

Jim Leap managed the farm at UC Santa Cruz from 1990 to 2011 and is a pro-bono consultant on this project. Over those 21 years, he saw how access to the farm changed the lives of children and university students, and said he believes that the farm at Del Mar could have an equally positive impact that would ripple through the community. 

“Eating is such a basic and essential thing that we do every single day, three times a day,” says Leap. “Getting a better understanding of where that food is being grown and how it’s being processed makes you healthier, stronger and a better citizen.”

Geoff Palla, a program manager at Life Lab, a Santa Cruz-based nonprofit that provides garden-based education programs, is also working to bring the farm to life, drawing from his 13 years of experience managing another famed school garden: the Edible Schoolyard Project in Berkeley, founded by chef and activist Alice Waters in 1995. It’s a groundbreaking school farm program that was created in partnership with Berkeley Unified School District but is its own nonprofit organization. 

He points out that a significant difference between the Edible Schoolyard and this farm is the focus on integrating the food grown at the farm into LOSD’s school kitchen. The Edible Schoolyard established its own kitchen on the site for students to learn about cooking the produce that was grown, but was never able to integrate food grown at its farm into the Berkeley district’s nutrition program.

“That’s the element that Alice had always wanted in Berkeley, and was never allowed to take it that far,” says Palla. “This is being driven by the food service department, and in other districts, it’s no. It’s typically the gardener who’s producing and kind of begging for their food to be incorporated, and they’re met with a lot of barriers.”

But at Del Mar Elementary, Perusse aims to coordinate a seasonal planting schedule so that produce from the farm would regularly be wheelbarrowed across the campus, prepared in the kitchen and eaten by students. 

“The goal would be to have produce from that farm grow and come into the cafeteria,” says Perusse, “and then also have it be an educational space that joins with the Life Lab garden and becomes an extension of that.” 

Del Mar already has a small school garden on its campus, colloquially called a Life Lab because it was originally founded by that local nonprofit of the same name, although today the two aren’t affiliated. Farm educator Casarez has tended the quarter-acre plot for the past six years, growing alliums, herbs, flowers and vegetables. Three days a week, students come to the garden to learn about the process of growing food, from seed to harvest to composting. 

During the 2022-23 school year, Casarez and his students grew tomatoes as the pilot project for a new Food Lab program created at the school and funded by the district. The students helped grow and harvest around 700 pounds of San Marzano tomatoes, which were processed in the school kitchen and turned into a tomato sauce for lasagne. 

But the small Life Lab garden isn’t able to produce the quantity of food needed to feature regularly in the school’s kitchen. “We want to create this school farm so we can produce enough food for the kids, and so kids can really see what it’s like from the planting stages to starting of seed, growing of plants to harvesting, delivering to the cafeteria, eating the food and recycling it back into compost,” says Casarez. 

Casarez says he’s eager to use the field as much as he can in no-cost ways until the project breaks ground. Last week, he and his students planted a pumpkin patch using seeds he already has, and which his students can return to in the fall. 

Over the past two years, Perusse, a registered dietician, has helped usher in a new era for the district’s nutrition program that focuses on from-scratch cooking, prioritizes relationships with local organic farms, and brings students into the kitchen to help prepare meals. The central kitchen is based at Del Mar Elementary, and provides breakfast and lunch to more than a thousand students from the district’s six schools in the Live Oak area, plus two nearby schools that purchase their meals from the district. 

The goal isn’t just to create a healthier, more nutritious meal; the team wants to educate students about how their food is grown, how it gets from the garden or farm to the kitchen, and how it can be prepared. 

Having a farm for the school on the campus, literally in sight of the kitchen itself, could be transformative for the students, their families and the community, Perusse says. 

“We’re focusing on slowly building a program where we integrate nutrition education, culinary education and [agriculture] education, and just trying to serve really, really good food to kids,” she told Lookout in March. 

A 10-page proposal for the project has been approved by the district and is publicly available on its website. Over the past year, parents have toured the site, and a farm task force meets monthly to gather parent input. Now, the focus is on funding.

Organizers anticipate it will take $220,000 to establish the farm, and with an annual operating cost of $150,000. The bulk of both of those figures is a full-time farmer employed by the district to manage the farm, and the rest is water and infrastructure, including irrigation, fencing, seeds and starts. Perusse said she doesn’t expect to receive funding from the district, which is currently mired in a budget crisis. 

So far, only $5,000 has been raised, via a small donation from Kaiser Permanente. But Leap said he is optimistic that the effort will reach its goal within a few years through grants, community organizations and philanthropy. Later, the team plans to seek endowments to ensure that the farm is fully funded for years to come. “We don’t want to be a financial burden to the district over time,” Leap says. “I’ve witnessed many projects like this that got started without the proper funding, and that only leads to a huge disaster, burnout and frustration. We don’t want to go there.”

Beyond the benefits to students, the farm could be a site for science-based summer camps and community farm dinners, and could have a public farm stand in the summer when school isn’t in session. Palla points out that research shows that school districts that engage with their families are more successful, and says the farm would be a powerful community engagement tool. 

“The goal is to build a sustainable farm that will have the right structure for it to live beyond us,” says Perusse. “If we really fund it, right, then we’re trying to get a project that lives and it’s part of this community for a long time.”

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