The state's inaugural venture came just 3 1/2 months after the law was enacted, when schools across the state celebrated the first Maryland Homegrown School Lunch Week in September. Nineteen of 24 school systems participated, some adding local tomatoes, corn, apples and carrots to school meals, others inviting growers to schools to showcase their crops, still others offering courses on food.
Education is an important part of most farm-to-school programs. Anyone from a teacher to a visiting grower can describe or demonstrate how a seed is planted, how a plant is nurtured, how much energy it consumes and generates.
"We want to teach kids that food doesn't grow in grocery stores," Raskin said. "It's part of an ecosystem, and the more they understand that, the more invested they become."
Brandishing a 6-foot cornstalk as a prop, Eidel told the group about his two daughters, who have grown up tending corn, beans and strawberries in the family's yard.
"They appreciate how much energy is required to raise a food-producing plant," he said.
Maryland comes fairly late, at least officially, to the farm-to-school movement, but Hagy of the Food Trust described its first homegrown lunch week as a resounding success.
Anne Arundel was one of the counties that took it seriously. Jodi Risse, supervisor of the school system's food and nutrition services, said it was eye-opening to call the district's longtime distributor, Keany Produce of Landover, and "talk to a human being on the other end" rather than faxing in the customary mass order.
Over three months, she spoke frequently with Keany reps to get updates on which local peaches seemed a little bruised or which apples and cherry tomatoes were the juiciest. She now repeats that process once a week throughout the growing season, which lasts, she said, into October.
Risse found a way to provide local produce for about 40,000 school meals a day during the week. In a year's time, Anne Arundel County's public schools have gone from buying no locally grown food to buying 38,000 pounds' worth, including squash, Asian pears, cantaloupe and zucchini.
This year, more than 20 counties and 30 farms have been collaborating to prepare for the second Homegrown School Lunch Week, which is scheduled to happen across the state Sept. 14-18.
Farm to school may not see substantial funding until the state's budget crisis lessens, but Hagy says interest throughout Maryland is keen and the bill passed last year provides a rare bureaucratic framework.
More than 40 states have some kind of farm-to-school movement now, but only a handful have cemented one in law, and that helps everyone sell the idea.
"You have a wonderful policy here in this region," she said.
Risse has already learned something Davis found out early on: that just as a seed some day becomes a flowering plant, the little things harvest big results.
Some of her most rewarding moments have come when she simply takes the time to show students a whole, fresh cucumber or peach.
Many have never seen a cuke unsliced or a peach that didn't come straight from a can. It amazes them, she observed, and makes the food taste that much better.
"This stuff sells itself," Risse said, her smile as fresh as a just-picked tomato. "We're giving them a tool they can use to make a healthy choice the rest of their lives."
