Photo caption: Sweet potatoes from our producer partner, Laughing Child Farm, fulfilling December Harvest of the Month orders.

By Ephraim Elmer, High School Senior Interning at GMFTS

My name is Ephraim, and I am a living example of why Green Mountain Farm-to-School (GMFTS) is important. “The mission of Green Mountain Farm-to-School is to strengthen local food systems in Vermont by promoting positive economic relationships, education, and access between schools, farms, and communities.” I grew up in Lowell going to Lowell Graded School, some of my fondest memories are when GMFTS came to my classroom. Now that I am older, I plan on owning my own farm business and working with Green Mountain Farm Direct. This blog will explain why I want to work with Farm Direct and GMFTS.

Green Mountain Farm Direct is a food hub program that is part of GMFTS. Farm Direct buys food from local farmers and food producers and sells it at the lowest prices possible so that institutions, especially schools, can afford to buy from them.

Harvest of the Month (HOM) is a program where a seasonal food item is chosen for production planning before the growing season starts, then Farm Direct ships the food to the schools that signed up for it. HOM offers to teach kids about the featured foods and expand the kinds of food they like to eat. For example, HOM for December 2025 is sweet potatoes and Farm Direct is sourcing those orders from a local farm – Laughing Child Farm.

Some examples of local farms and businesses that schools serve food from include: VT Salumi, which produces high-quality charcuterie (such as salami and sausage links); Hall’s Orchards, which grows apples and pears; and Laughing Child Farm, which produces sweet potatoes; and many more.

It isn’t just schools that buy from Farm Direct, however, restaurants, co-ops, farmstands and hospitals also buy from the program. This circulates the local food so that everyone is able to eat locally. Some businesses you might be familiar with that order regularly from Farm Direct are Copley Hospital, Morrisville Food Co-op, Craftsbury General Store, and Green Mountain Natural Foods.

Farm Direct partners with the Center for an Agricultural Economy (CAE) for warehousing and distribution. CAE is an organization based in Hardwick that works to make the agricultural and food world a better place. Farm Direct shares the CAE’s new warehouse space. There are more organizations that use the warehouse too, like Myers Produce, whose mission is to “increase farmers’ and producers’ access to markets within our region, in an effort to keep land in agriculture in the Northeast”.

Every Monday, I go into the warehouse to inventory what is there (checking amounts of each item, expiration dates, and labeling items that are leaving).

Occasionally, food that Farm Direct buys from producers doesn’t get purchased in time before it gets too close to its expiration date to make it to its destination. A week or two before the expiration date, that food gets taken off the website. Most of it goes to food shelves and other access outlets throughout Northern Vermont where people on a tight budget benefit from local food.

A lot of farms have to sell to big distributors. Those distributors aren’t designed for smaller farms that just have a few hundred animals or a few acres to grow crops. Small farms that use such large distributors often struggle to stay in business. Farm Direct is there to help those small farms and food producers.

Farm Direct is a key partner in enabling schools and other organizations to have access to good quality local food and not just whatever is mass produced from around the world.