This Virginia Farm to School Resource Guide is designed to help cultivate connections between the many diverse stakeholders that support the Virginia Farm to School Program. This guide is intended to help facilitate locally and regionally-grown Virginia foods to school cafeterias and school-based meal programs. It contains research-based information, resources, and advice that can help start or expand a Farm to School initiative in your community. Farm to School programs locally and nationally come in many different shapes and sizes that are ultimately unique to the communities that develop them. Stakeholders that may find this guide helpful include: Virginia school nutrition directors, farmers, food distributors, Virginia Cooperative Extension professionals, and other school-based and agriculture-based educators and service providers interested in Farm to School programs.

Virginia’s food system directly impacts the survival and viability of farms and farmland; the economic development of rural and urban communities; the care, restoration, and resilience of ecological resources such as local waterways; and critical health issues. We use the language of community, local, and regional food systems to broadly define a complex and interconnected set of systems and pathways that comprise sustainable food production, processing, distribution, consumption, and waste management to bring about social, economic, and ecological change that benefits all residents.

In 2012, Delegate Delores McQuinn introduced House Joint Resolution 88 and then in 2013 reintroduced House Joint Resolution 646 to request that the Virginia General Assembly review the issue of food deserts in Virginia. The Honorable William Howell, Speaker of the House of Delegates of the Virginia General Assembly, commissioned Alan Grant, dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech, and Jewel Hairston, dean of the College of Agriculture at Virginia State University, to conduct a study of food deserts in the Commonwealth of Virginia.