From field to lunch tray: Live Oak’s thriving school farm grows thousands of pounds of produce for students

On a warm spring evening, high school students dressed in black chef coats plated herb-marinated chicken and passed trays of mushroom bao to nearly 100 parents and community leaders. The meal took place not in a school cafeteria, but on a farm on the edge of the Del Mar Elementary School campus in Live Oak. 

The second annual Spring Farm Dinner celebrated the end of the first year of vegetable production at the Live Oak School District farm. The groundbreaking facility blends nutrition and education for the district’s seven schools and aims to address issues of health inequities and food insecurity in its community. Half of the students are Hispanic, a third are English learners and 60% are socioeconomically disadvantaged. 

When the nutrition program hosted the dinner for the first time in 2025, the site was still an open field. Now, in 2026, the program looks back on impressive milestones. 

Over the school year, the site grew 17 varieties of vegetables and herbs – a total of 4,800 pounds of produce – and welcomed more than 1,500 students from kindergarten through eighth grade. In addition to Spring Farm Dinner, it hosted an autumn Pumpkins & Pancakes party and an Earth Day celebration. 

The farm grew 17 varieties of produce, such as kale, sweet peppers and tomatoes, and all of the broccoli and carrots for the district’s food program, two popular vegetables served weekly in dishes like roasted broccoli with orange chicken. Whole carrots with the green tops attached replaced pre-bagged baby carrots, much to the children’s delight. “The kids think they’re Bugs Bunny,” said nutrition director Kelsey Perusse.  

There’s more to come. In June and July, the farm will host free weeklong Food & Farm summer camps for the district’s students. Program leaders also reflected on what they could improve for the 2026-27 school year, including adjusting excess quantities of some vegetables, storing abundant harvests for future use and shortening a spring planting gap.

Two years ago, establishing an organic farm on an unused baseball field was just a twinkle in Perusse’s eye. While educational gardens are fairly common at schools nationwide, farms that grow food for a single school, let alone a whole district, are rare. There are only three other examples in the state, including Santa Clara Unified School District, where Perusse previously worked as a dietician. Even the famed Edible Schoolyard Project in Berkeley, established by chef and activist Alice Waters in 1995 and often considered the standard for exemplary garden education, doesn’t grow food for its district.

In 2024, Perusse told Lookout that she believed her team could build a farm for Live Oak students. She envisioned rows of vegetables that could be harvested, washed and wheelbarrowed across a basketball court to a central kitchen, an apple orchard for students to play under, a fort covered in wisteria vines and berry bushes and space for a tractor. 

Four years after a group of educators, farmers and activists began work on the project, almost everything on Perusse’s list is a reality, thanks to a combination of grants, state-level funding for student enrichment and food service operations and an anonymous donor, who got the program off the ground with a $125,000 donation through Community Foundation Santa Cruz County. 

Farmer Geoff Palla, the farm’s full-time caretaker, led dinner guests around freshly tilled rows of soil to admire a young orchard of Newtown Pippin apples. While the orchard could never supply the apples needed to feed the student body – the nutrition program sources directly from local organic farms for that – it was created as an interactive outdoor classroom. When the fruit develops, students will help thin the small apples to improve production and later harvest the apples for pies, to press into cider or eat out of hand. 

Throughout the school year, Palla worked closely with Scott Felgner, the district’s chef, to understand how the kitchen ordered and prepared 2,750 meals for 1,200 students daily. 

“That was really helpful to get him up to speed on what our quantities would be, and what would be feasible for him to grow for our full production,” said Felgner. Every week, Palla and Felgner sit down to discuss what the kitchen needs, what is ready at the farm and what they can source from the farmers market. 

At first, it was intimidating to receive so much raw produce instead of vegetables suppliers had already processed. Felgner leans on the skills of the Food Lab program, an extracurricular class made up of students from neighboring Cypress High School. Students learn culinary skills while they prepare meals in the district’s central kitchen and are a vital source of labor in creating from-scratch menu items. They helped integrate the harvests into as many dishes as possible, such as pasta with kale pesto, pupusas served with farm-grown cabbage curtido, zucchini muffins, homemade marinara and salsa made with fresh tomatoes. 

“We started to include an entire structure of the Food Lab class. In every class, we have a knife skill station, so that they process all the broccoli that we bring in. Prior to this, we were receiving broccoli that comes pre-cut into florets in bags,” Felgner said. 

Palla also considered what he could grow that wouldn’t require a ton of labor. “The things that I choose to grow are all in service of the kitchen, and I’m constantly thinking of their labor needs,” he said. He intentionally grew produce such as snap peas and cherry tomatoes that could be quickly rinsed and served. 

Starting in August, the nutrition team advertised farm-grown ingredients on menus to students. 

“We made sure that we had good signage, and we would let the kids know. At that point, a lot of them had started to see it and even walk through the space, so they did get excited about it,” said Felgner. Overall, it was a hit, especially because most students had visited the farm. “The quality was also much better. It tasted better, and looked nicer.”

Palla plans on adjusting quantities of some vegetables for the next growing season. He grew too much cabbage, exceeding the kitchen’s ability to use it in curtido and coleslaw. Conversely, he plans to purchase hoop-house tunnels so he can grow produce in winter and early spring. In April, there wasn’t much in the fields. “The concept is, how to have food every month of the year, including these months that we’re in right now,” Palla said. 

Anything the kitchen couldn’t use is donated back to student families via Second Harvest Food Bank at the Del Mar Elementary and Live Oak Elementary campuses. While the district cannot directly distribute food, Perusse worked with the food bank to make sure that the farm-grown produce went only to these sites. “It doesn’t even have to leave the campus,” she said. By April, the program had donated 420 pounds of food from the farm. 

Different groups of students visit the farm daily on field trips or with their classroom. The preschoolers come out frequently to hang out and pick a strawberry, and the garden educator holds three to five classes daily. But Perusse was surprised when other campus workers began using the space. The mental health clinician and speech therapist bring their students out for counseling sessions because it’s a calm environment, she said. 

She hopes other school departments like education services and after-care continue to use the farm freely. “One thing that you often find in school districts is that so many departments operate in silos. Everyone is there in service of the kids, but they’re operating in their own lanes,” said Perusse. “My goal has always been that, the more connections you build on campuses, I think the more we can all lift up students.” 

At the farm dinner, Food Lab students created a four-course menu of upscale versions of what is served to students throughout the year, using produce from the farm when possible. After a fresh spring chopped salad with lemon vinaigrette, students served ravioli filled with fresh peas and ricotta, followed by herb-marinated chicken over saffron rice. The lemon strawberry tartlet served for dessert used organic strawberries from Margarita Castro of My Organic Farm in Salinas, who provides nearly all of the district’s berries. 

Jacqueline Day, a regional leader at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, spoke at the meal and emphasized the potential impact of the farm. 

“From health to the environment, you can’t think of one thing that school food does not impact,” said Day. “What kids learn to like here, they like for a lifetime.”

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