Fresh, Local Food Pilot Launches in Schools

Apr 11, 2023

Fresh food carts in five Nova Scotia schools will support farmers and give students greater access to locally grown produce, help them understand where food comes from, and fuel their learning.

The $100,000 pilot project was recently launched by the Department of Agriculture in collaboration with the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development and Nova Scotia Health. Access to healthy, nutritious food at school is an important part of supporting students’ learning and development.

“We are funding these fresh food carts in schools to support buying local, give our farmers an expanded market for their produce, and teach young people to choose a healthy variety of foods,” said Agriculture Minister Greg Morrow.

The food carts are large, portable salad bars containing Nova Scotian-grown carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, onions, apples and other seasonal produce.

The food carts are open for student lunches Tuesdays and Thursdays each week at the following schools in the Chignecto Central Regional Centre for Education:

Springhill Junior-Senior High (grades 7-12)
Tatamagouche Regional Academy (grades Primary-12)
Elmsdale District School (grades Primary-5)
G.R. Saunders Elementary, Stellarton (grades Primary-6)
Winding River Consolidated, Stewiacke (grades Primary-6).

The Department of Agriculture is working to get more locally grown and produced foods in schools, hospitals, and in long-term care and correctional facilities. It also has a goal to ensure that at least 20 per cent of food purchased by Nova Scotians is locally grown by 2030.

Source : Novascotia .ca

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids