Locally grown food has found its way into the kitchens at Pine River-Backus School.

The school kitchen has been working hard this fall to get more locally grown fruit and vegetables into student's diets.

Brenda Anderson, Pine River-Backus School's food service director, began working with the University of Minnesota's Farm to School Program earlier this year.

There are two main focuses of Farm to School. One is to try and get more fresh fruits and vegetables into student's diets and the other reason is to support the local economy.

Anderson started her local shopping this summer. She visited the Pine River Farmer's Market and bought some wild rice and honey.

Once school started, Anderson also received some donations from local farmers. Tom and Lorraine Race brought many boxes of sweet corn to the school.

"One of the issues with this program is that it becomes very labor intensive, so we incorporated students into the program to help out," Anderson said.

Sixth grade students pitched in to help husk the sweet corn, and it was also an educational experience for them. The class then added the husks to their compost pile for their class garden.

Another source for a lot of fresh produce was local organic farmer Dave Massey.

"It was about to frost and he told us to come out and get what we could and he would donate it," Anderson said.

From Massey's garden Anderson was able to get strawberries, heirloom tomatoes, kale, cucumbers, squash, onions, basil, cauliflower and cabbage.

"I was flabbergasted at the amount of produce he donated to us," Anderson said.

Anderson served the various fresh fruits and vegetables to the students, and most of the kids really liked the additions to the menu.

One of the menu items that the students enjoyed the most was a summer squash salad, which surprised Anderson.

"I'm going to try and incorporate the things that the kids really seemed to enjoy into the menu more often," Anderson said.

According to Anderson, the kitchen staff also enjoyed the program because they got to be creative and find and create recipes.

Anderson also utilized some of the produce for educational purposes. The dinosaur kale that was donated by Massey was made into a soup and Anderson served it to the sixth grade and a high school creative cooking class.

"It was a good lesson. We talked about the history of kale and how it came from the old country and how it's a very hardy plant," Anderson said.

Anderson plans to continue the Farm to School program at Pine River-Backus.

"This is a great way to incorporate more fruits and vegetables into the kids diets and it helping out the local farmers too. I think that it's important that we work hard to do both," Anderson said.