By WILL PERKINS
Glasgow News 1
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has awarded Barren County Schools with a grant worth over $123,000.
The funds will go toward strengthening the district’s hands-on agriculture programs and Farm to School efforts, including the addition of two greenhouses, said CheyAnne Fant, director of nutrition services and after-school programs.
“This will also increase our production capacity and have a deeper integration of locally grown food and student-grown foods,” she said during Thursday night’s board of education meeting.
The school district is being awarded $123,478 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Patrick Leahy Farm to School Grant Program for Fiscal Year 2026, according to the department’s list of awardees document posted on its website.
Fant said the school district has worked closely with the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, Ag Commissioner Jonathan Shell and their attorneys, “to make sure that we are doing things in the right way, so that we can safely serve the homegrown food to our students.”
Andy Joe Moore, Farm to School coordinator for the school district, said being able to work with the department of agriculture and Shell has been a great learning experience.
He said this grant will give every student in the district the opportunity to be a part of the program.
“We don’t have to exclude anybody,” Moore said. “We might have somebody that wants to grow a tomato plant in a five-gallon bucket on their back porch.
“Now we can do that.”
Moore said every campus in the school district grows food, and that the high school’s greenhouse is close to producing 100 pounds of lettuce every week.
With this new grant, the district will be able to add two 25×25 foot greenhouses at elementary schools, a germination chamber, a tractor-operated rotary tiller and more tower gardens.
Two student co-op positions will also be created to help work the program, Fant said.
“Barren County is a place of innovation,” she said. “And we feel like this is one of our next big innovations.”
