Live Oak School Farm Hires Managers, Hosts First Harvest Event

The Live Oak School District’s Nutrition and Education Farm Project, while still well underway, is beginning to bear fruit.

In May, Lookout reported that a team of educators, farmers and activists is working to transform an unused baseball field on the Del Mar Elementary School campus into a working farm for the district and a meeting and event space for the surrounding community.

In October, Geoff Palla, a former program manager at Life Lab, a Santa Cruz-based nonprofit that offers garden-based education programs, was hired as Farm 2 School manager to oversee all farm operations and support food purchases from other local farms . Palla also draws from his 13 years of experience running another famous school garden: the Edible Schoolyard Project in Berkeley, founded in 1995 by chef and activist Alice Waters.

This Saturday, October 26th, the site will host its first Pumpkin & Pancakes event from 9 a.m. to noon, featuring a pumpkin patch, pancakes, pumpkin and face painting, a farmers market and a raffle. The family-friendly event is free and open to the public. It is recommended that you donate $15 per family to the future farm.

Led by Nutrition Director Kelsey Perusse, the project will transform 1.1 acres of the school’s 2-acre baseball field into a nutrition and education farm when completed. The site would serve as an educational center for students and produce fruits and vegetables in quantities large enough to be integrated into the district’s nutrition program. It will be one of four school production farms in the state, joining the Manteca Unified School District, the Rio Unified School District in Ventura County and the Santa Clara Unified School District, where Perusse previously worked.

The plan was approved last spring and the project is actively seeking $220,000 to establish the farm with annual operating costs of $150,000. The majority of these two numbers is a full-time farmer employed by the district to manage the farm, and the remainder is water and infrastructure, including irrigation, fencing, seeds and plantings.

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