Need More Acres showcases University of Kentucky partnerships at Farm to Health(care) Festival

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (WBKO) – America’s Health Rankings ranked Kentucky 11 for fruit and vegetable consumption by state, reporting just under 9% of adults said they eat two or more fruits and three or more vegetables daily.

Need More Acres has been working to change that with its partnerships with area universities, including the University of Kentucky, which were put on display at the farm’s Farm to Health(care) Festival.

Michelle Howell, a full-time farmer with Need More Acres, said the festival is about gathering the community around local farmers and displaying local foodways and food benefits.

“One of the ways we’re doing that with the University of Kentucky is through a grant where we’re creating an educational curriculum for eighth graders. So this would be middle schoolers that want to learn more about agriculture, but they’re learning about local agriculture, and then also how to get involved in their community in different ways. Another way that we’re working with the University of Kentucky is on our food as medicine efforts. So they’re helping us do data collection and research to show how we can partner with public health to improve people’s health but with locally grown food.”

For the curriculum, students will follow along as three videos show the stories of farmers and those they help with ten interactive lessons, finally culminating into a social action project.

“The only way we’re going to have young people want to think about farming full time later in life is to show them all the different career opportunities that will be available to them,” Howell said. “So we like to show them through this curriculum that they can be farmers, but they can also work with public health, they can also work with schools, they could work with institutional buyers.”

Both Howell and Nancy Owens, Senior Nutrition Education Program Assistant with the Allen County Cooperative Extension, stressed the importance of spreading knowledge on farming practices and food literacy.

“If you can get youth in right now and get them to make those smaller changes in their lifestyle as they get older that can help prevent some of the chronic diseases that you may have, such as diabetes, heart disease, things like that,” Owens said.

Owens added that doing partnerships like this with local farms adds a greater charm and ease of access for the community.

“I think that being a community partnership in being able to get the food grown locally is just more nutritious for all of the families,” Owens said. “You’re gathering information and staying up to date, and to be able to help them, it just helps the community all together.”

Need More Acres provides free food boxes to certain groups in the area, for more information visit their website.

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