Lebanon High School is growing its nutritional impact with its own year-round hydroponic vegetables. The school's child nutrition team recently started experimenting with two vertical hydroponic growing systems, providing students with fresh butterhead lettuce, summer crisp, romaine, arugula, kale, northern lights chard, fire chard, and fresh basil.
"It started as like kind of a pipe dream idea over the summer," said the school's child nutrition coordinator, Megan Grippa. "We had someone from Fork Farms, where we purchased our hydroponic farms from, speak at my conference and I heard a little bit of her speech and was kind of inspired."
According to Grippa, a major part of her work has been ensuring that students are not only fed nutritious food while they are at school, but that those meals are appetizing. She said the school's two farm systems are helping her achieve that mission.
"We paid about $4,000 for each farm and in my mind, for the savings we have in product that's not going in the trash can, and the educational opportunity, it's paying for itself already," she said. Grippa's team served over 10,000 meals in November alone, which only had 17 operating days. She said those meals are served at lunchtime when students can choose from a wide selection of fresh meals during including a salad bar.
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