Thursday, September 26, 2024
A local farm is helping schools provide a more nutritious lunch option for their students — 100% beef from Central Texas cattle.
Barnard Beef Cattle Company, a family-owned ranch located between Gatesville and Waco that has served the community for more than 100 years, will supply beef from its farm to McGregor, Lampasas, and Crawford Independent School Districts this upcoming school year.
“We just feel like it’s really important to do this — to get really good nutrition into these kids’ hands,” said Blayr Barnard, owner of Barnard Beef Cattle Company.
After Barnard read a 2012 report that went viral about how a school lunch burger contained 26 ingredients, she knew she wanted to help provide a healthier, less processed option for schools when given the opportunity. Barnard said the food she will deliver to the schools will contain one simple ingredient — beef.
“When you think about it, if a burger patty alone has 26 ingredients, and then you add cheese with several ingredients, and then you add a burger bun with several ingredients, that’s a lot of different ingredients for one item,” Barnard said. “If you can take 25 ingredients out of that, that’s pretty incredible. That gets you so much closer to a super healthy product.”
“It tastes like real beef,” she adds. “It doesn’t have the high salt content either, so it’s not just swimming in MSG or salt.”
According to an NPR article from 2012, the 26-ingredient burger contains hard-to-pronounce ingredients such as thiamine mononitrate, disodium inosinate and pyridoxine hydrochloride. Since then, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and schools across the country have endeavored to improve nutrition standards for school meals.
Through the Local Food for Schools grant by the Texas Department of Agriculture, Texas schools can apply to receive state funds and resources that connect them with local farmers and ranchers to bring more local, minimally processed foods to school lunch tables.
“McGregor ISD looked at the different local options to see what minimally processed foods were available in our area and decided that the healthiest choice that we could offer to our students was locally raised beef,” Lisa Mays, director of food services at McGregor ISD, said via email. “Purchasing the fresh, ground beef from Barnard Cattle Company will allow the district to serve beef that is all natural and contains no preservatives.”
Because Barnard’s farm encompasses hundreds of acres that cross Coryell County and parts of McGregor, the students will be served beef raised from cattle within or only a few miles from their school district.
“We are so excited to partner with Barnard Cattle Company,” McGregor ISD Superintendent Travis Mutscher said. “This is an excellent example of local control with state funds, working with our community and providing a superior benefit to our students.”
Barnard emphasizes that the school districts are the ones that led the partnership with the goal to provide healthier food options for their students.
“This was not parents saying ‘we need this,’ and it was not students saying ‘we need this,’ it was employees saying 'I want to provide a better product to the kids that I care about,” Barnard said.
While Barnard Beef Cattle Company will serve three local school districts this year, Barnard said they are open to supplying more schools in the future.
“It would be a pretty neat thing to bring on more and be able to think of kids getting really nutritious products,” Barnard said.
Although the farm has a decades-long legacy, Barnard first took over the family business in 2015. The company sells grain-finished and grass-fed beef, pork and chicken to consumers across the state of Texas.
