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(06/30/25) BATON ROUGE, La. — For the past seven years, the LSU AgCenter has been sponsoring Seeds to Success: The Louisiana Farm to School Program, which works directly with teachers and educates them on how to grow a garden at school. The program, open to teachers of all grades and ages, prepares them to integrate their gardens into their lesson plans.
The program got its start in 2016 after Act 404 was signed, which created a state-run farm to school program. The weeklong trainings began in 2018. Since then, nearly 150 teachers have been trained, which impacts thousands of students.
For the initiative in 2025, the Farm to School Garden training ran from May 26 to 30, and most days consisted of lectures and hands-on activities as well as taste tests and advice for using the garden in lunches for the students. There also are lessons for teachers on how to use the garden in their day-to-day classes with lessons in English, math, history and science, among others.
Outside of the garden, the program also teaches the attendees about finding and buying local foods as well as healthy meals that can be easily made at a school. For Cecilia Stevens, ambassador and institute manager of the Farm to School Program, a school garden can be the most beneficial when combined with procuring local ingredients and finding meals that are made from the fruits and vegetables grown on a campus.
“That's where the lunch and learning kind of bridges all three of those together,” Stevens said. “We talk about procurement and how to purchase locally and to do that safely. Also, how to prepare it and in a way that it's not so time consuming that cafeterias can add it to what they already did.”
After the weeklong program, the teachers are given helpful tools to start their school garden, like a planting guide calendar and other information on local plants and produce.
But for Tyne Bankester, the Seeds to Success program manager, the hope after the classes is that the teachers will return to their schools able to speak and educate others on the garden and make it a school wide activity.
“The ideal result is that when they go back to their school and more people join them, they are able to build more of a farm to school community within their school,” Bankester said. “That they always feel inspired and they feel equipped to go back and have others participate with them and they don't feel like they have to hide.”
Denyse Cummins helps teachers with power tools as they work on a project that will allow them to grow plants in schools during Seeds to Success: The Louisiana Farm to School Program at the Hill Farm Teaching Facility. Photo by Anthony Bailey/LSU AgCenter
Teachers work together to drill holes into trash cans as they learn inventive ways to make containers for plants. Photo by Anthony Bailey/LSU AgCenter
