We provided $60 million from the American Rescue Plan Act to improve food and agriculture supply chain resiliency for 54 state agencies that administer the National School Lunch Program. Use this dashboard to explore successes implemented by each state and territory.
We have studied school meal program operations for a long time. You can access published reports that go back to school year 1988-89. Each study in this series focuses on topics that are important to program operations at the time. Sometimes the studies also collect information about other child nutrition programs, like the Child and Adult Care Food Program and Summer Food Service Program.
We regularly collect information about the school meal programs and how they operate from the people who know best – the state agencies that oversee the programs in each state and territory and the school food authorities that manage the programs locally in one or more schools.
The Child Nutrition Act requires USDA to annually compile and publish breastfeeding performance measurements. We use this data to monitor breastfeeding trends and to help identify exemplary performance of WIC state and local agencies in breastfeeding and make awards to such agencies.
The 2023 Farm to School Census collected information on farm to school participation by school food authorities (SFAs) in school year 2022–23. Every SFA participating in the National School Lunch Program in the 50 states, Washington, DC, and five territories received an online survey asking about the farm to school activities they participated in, details of their participation, and their perspectives on farm to school.
These files contain Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program profile data by fiscal year. The profile data includes grant amounts, number of recipients, benefit levels and numbers of participating farmers, markets, stands and Community-Supported Agriculture systems for each state agency that administers the SFMNP.
The State of Origin data report for each fiscal year includes information on states where USDA purchased foods in that year. Learn where your USDA Foods are likely to come from, and what the top food is in your state!
The Farm to School Census and Comprehensive Review includes the 2019 Farm to School Census; a descriptive review of the USDA Farm to School grant program; a review of published research on farm to school since 2010; and a set of interviews with school food distributors.
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 (HHFKA; PL 111-296) required the USDA Food and Nutrition Service to conduct a demonstration that adds Medicaid to the list of programs used to directly certify students for free school meals. Although students receiving Medicaid are not categorically eligible for free meals, the DC-M demonstration authorizes selected States and districts to use income information from Medicaid files to directly certify those students found to be eligible for free meals.
The purpose of this study is to describe current methods of direct certification used by state and local agencies and challenges facing states and local education agencies in attaining high matching rates.