MSTFP grows food in our six beautiful school gardens which we give away to students and the local food pantry. We teach students from PreK to 8th grade in the school gardens about food production, nutrition and resource conservation.
We are proud to say we are now the biggest producer of fresh produce for the local food pantry, serving Montezuma County, the Ute Mountain Ute reservation and beyond! During this summer we managed to almost triple our food production and thanks to the money from Big Green we were able to hire a part time production expert and local legend, who has helped us achieve our lofty goal. Our middle school garden is on track to produce around 6000 lbs of food this season. Our gardens are both production gardens and education gardens. Last year we spent over 300 hours teaching classes about food production, nutrition and resource conservation. We served over 1500 students all in rural school districts. Students took home a record amount of fresh food and we distributed almost 10,000 tastings during class time.
We only have one full time staff member, so we have utilized the AmeriCorps program and volunteers to achieve our mission. Our education director has expanded middle school programming, creating an elective which runs for nice weeks. Students harvest, market and sell produce to raise money for their schools and learn the business of farming. Even though we are small, we are finding innovative ways to grow more food, feed more people and share knowledge!