Quick Take
Still a work in progress, Live Oak School District’s farm project will host its first event this Saturday and has a new general manager to oversee farm operations.
While still very much a work in progress, Live Oak School District’s nutrition and education farm project is beginning to bear fruit.
In May, Lookout reported that a team of educators, farmers and activists is working to transform an unused baseball field on the Del Mar Elementary School campus into a working farm for the district and a gathering and event space for the surrounding community.
In September, Geoff Palla, a former program manager at Life Lab, a Santa Cruz-based nonprofit that provides garden-based education programs, was hired as the Farm 2 School manager to oversee all farm operations and support food purchases from other local farms. Palla is also 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.
This Saturday, Oct. 26, from 9 a.m. to noon, the site will host its first event, Pumpkins & Pancakes, with a pumpkin patch, pancakes, pumpkin and face painting, a farmers market and a raffle. The family-friendly event is free and open to the public, with a suggested donation of $15 per family to the future farm.
Led by nutrition director Kelsey Perusse, the project, when completed, will turn 1.1 acres of the school’s 2-acre baseball field into a nutrition and education farm. The site would be an education center for students, and produce fruits and vegetables in quantities large enough to incorporate into the district’s nutrition program. 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.
The plan was approved last spring, and the project is actively seeking $220,000 to establish the farm, 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.
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FOR THE RECORD: A previous version of the story wrongly stated which month Geoff Palla was hired. He was hired in September.
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