This is a story about kids and kohlrabi. 

And radishes. And beans. And pea shoots, salad greens, eggplants, and sometimes even an ancient Native American squash that resembles a giant snake. 

Unlike most tales about kids and vegetables, however, this one doesn’t end in kitchen-table stand-offs or pocketed napkins full of half-chewed bits. 

It begins 15 years ago, with one clever idea to get kids eating more locally grown, healthy eats: Put a pop-up farmers market inside their school.

Maybe a school-based farm market doesn’t sound so groundbreaking now, what with farm-to-table menus as common today as quinoa, but at that time Up North, the local food movement was fairly new on the restaurant scene. It was practically unheard of in K-12 education. (Some perspective: Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities didn’t even propose the now-statewide farm-to-lunch table program, 10 Cents a Meal, as a pilot project in Traverse City schools until 2012.)

Credit for making the at-school farm market idea a reality goes to Maureen “Mo” Earl, whom Rob Sirrine, senior educator at MSU Extension’s Suttons Bay office, calls “the real instigator” of the plan. Earl worked at Leland Public School (LPS) and saw in Leelanau’s fields and orchards an opportunity to tap into the tastebuds of a largely untapped audience. 

Rather than pushing parents to buy local or simply hoping they’d bring their kids to an area farmers market, Earl envisioned bringing a market to the kids, allowing them to touch, taste, and learn about County-grown goodies from the farmers who raised them; and outfitting students with the means to purchase produce for themselves.

With farmers from Leelanau and funding from the County’s MSU Extension, LPS hosted its first school market in 2007. It was such a hit among students, teachers, and participating farmers that Northport, St. Mary, Glen Lake, Pathfinder, and Suttons Bay schools, as well as Grand Traverse County’s Courtade and Buckley Elementary schools, have since hosted markets too.

Despite its popularity and spread, the at-school farm market experiment still has no official name. Or strict blueprint. Or consistent funding source. Rather, it plays out like a beloved passion project, uniquely tailored to each school and different funding requirements, and made possible simply because so many people and organizations believe in it. 

MSU Extension and Northwest Education are primary players; both not only find and help with funding and logistics but also free up staff to help ensure each market is fun, fits each school’s needs and funding requirements, and that teachers and students alike get vouchers so all have the opportunity to shop, says Elena Mosher, farm to school coordinator and nutrition facilitator for Northwest Education Services (formerly TBAISD).

PTOs and community donors pitch in, too. Some schools link their market to related lessons—in nutrition and wellness, personal finance, economics, the environment, etc.—and activities like measuring ingredients and making applesauce. Since the pandemic, most keep their market outdoors, and many hold them for a few hours near student pick-up and drop-off, so parents can shop with their kids.

Nic Welty has been attending or sending goods and produce from his and wife Jen Welty’s 9 Bean Rows farm since the school markets started. He admits the school-market timing—always September and October—is tough for farmers.

“It is peak harvest time. For farmers like us, it’s also planting time. But that said, the good part of having it at the beginning of each school year is we also have the highest amount/variety of things to bring in to kids,” says Welty.

Vegetables are only part of the wares available. Thanks to participation with local 4-H, Mosher says kids at some of this year’s markets got up close with baby goats. Some had the option to meet chickens.

At a recent market at Suttons Bay Public Schools, kids could choose from a host of veggies as well as maple syrup from Maple Sugar Bush, honey sticks from Bee Joyful, cheese wedges shaped and decorated to look like mice from Leelanau Cheese, plus apples (fresh and caramel-covered), eggs, baked goods, dried lavender, fresh flowers, watermelons, and some sizable gourds and pumpkins. (“The teachers probably don’t love us for that,” says Welty.)

Nevertheless, he says, the payoff is worth the extra effort: “You do it with the thought that you’re educating the next generation about food.”

“The remarkable thing is how open kids are to trying and tasting new vegetables,” Welty adds, recalling an early market he attended. “One kid was so excited, he ate one of the onions like an apple.”

Clearly, the experience made an impact—and gave this kid-meets-veggie tale its happy ending: “That same kid came to work at [9 Bean Rows] a couple years later.”

One at-school farm market remains for the 2022 season: Northport Public School, 104 S. Wing St., will host its pop-up farmers market 12:30pm–3:30pm Friday, Oct. 14. The public is welcome.

Pictured: Farm fresh faces at Leland Public School; the Buckley Bears host Still Point Market of Empire.