FRESNO, Calif. — The number of veterinarians who work with farm animals is on the decline as many retire and fewer students choose large-animal practice. Officials are worried about the impact on food safety, because large-animal veterinarians serve as inspectors at ranches and slaughterhouses. “They’re basically on the front line when it comes to maintaining a safe food supply, not only in the U.S., but in products we export. Vets diagnose diseases that can be transferred from animals to humans,” says David Kirkpatrick, spokesman for the American Veterinary Medical Association. A recent survey by the association found that only 2% of veterinary school students in 2010 graduating classes said they plan to work mostly with large, non-pet animals. Another 7% studied a mixed curriculum that included all types of animals, but the majority of those respondents lean toward pet care. “We have known for years anecdotally that vets were having a difficult time finding people to work at their practice or selling it when they retire,” Kirkpatrick said. “But now we know how big the problem is and how that will magnify over the years,” he said. QUALITY: Shrinking beef market may mean poorer meat at stores From 1998 to 2009, the number of small animal vets climbed to 47,118 from 30,255, while the number of farm-animal vets dropped to 5,040 from 5,553. And the AVMA found that large-animal vets often earn a lower salary: an average of $57,745 compared with $64,744 for small-animal vets, according to a 2008 survey. The large-animal vet world is graying — half of farm-animal vets are older than 50, and only 4.4% are younger than 30. About a third of veterinarians working at the federal level are eligible to retire in the next three years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture . At least six rural counties in California have just one large-animal veterinarian. Stuart Hall, 28, a veterinarian in Visalia, Calif., said a single call can tie him up for four hours — time in which he can’t respond to emergencies. “My worry is always that a farmer is going to try to take care of something themselves,” he said. Hall was born in rural England and educated in London before his interest in working with cows brought him to Tulare County, the nation’s largest dairy producer, five years ago. He and his wife have a blog detailing his life as a farm vet. “I just really like cows. They’re big, old gentle things,” he says. Hall likes working outdoors, the drives through the country and the impact his expertise can have on food operations, he says. But for pre-vet student Justeen Borrecco the decision to pursue a career in pet medicine was easy. She has been shoved, bruised and knocked down by the sheep she feeds every day as a student worker at the on-campus farm at California State University, Fresno. “This is why I want to work with dogs and kitties. I don’t want to deal with anything bigger than me,” the 19-year-old said. On Thursday she pulled on her farm boots, picked up bundles of hay and maneuvered her 130-pound frame around to feed dozens of ewes and lambs. “But it’s still good experience. Anything I learn or help with, like vaccines or bandaging, can apply to other animals,” Borrecco said. The sophomore from Hanford, Calif., said it’s important to get as much hands-on time with animals before applying to vet school. Several schools and states have tried to lure students to large-animal veterinary medicine. At the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine, applicants interested in becoming farm-animal vets have an admissions edge. The university has slowly boosted the number of students interested in large-animal medicine to 11 of 127, double the number from four years ago. The vet school has also reached out to high schools in rural areas. More than a dozen states, from Washington to Georgia, offer some type of loan repayment program or other incentives if students pledge to work in a region in need of large-animal vets. Vet students typically finish school with about $134,000 in debt, according to the AVMA. Iowa State’s VSMART program allows students focused on farm animals to reduce by a year the amount of time it takes to get a veterinary medicine degree — a big deal when you’re talking about spending upward of $32,000 a year, Kirkpatrick said. Federal legislators have introduced several bills to help increase the number of farm animal vets, including the Veterinary Services Investment Act, which is aimed at recruitment, helping vets expand their practices and providing financial assistance for students. The bill passed the House in September and is awaiting approval in the Senate. The students who have chosen to work with large animals are committed to their choice. Elizabeth Adam, 26, of Santa Maria, Calif., earned a degree in English and business at Loyola Marymount University , and later worked as a consultant at a law firm — but really dreamed of being a farm doctor. “I was making good money but was miserable,” she said. Adam is now in her second year at Fresno State’s pre-vet program. “This is for me,” she said. “The outdoors and the late night emergency calls and the country — I’m ready for all of that.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 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PUEBLO, Colo. — At 8:28 a.m., the cafeteria ladies of Centennial High School take up positions in the second-floor hallway, just outside closed classroom doors. Each woman is pushing a cart loaded with milk, juice, whole-wheat doughnuts and individual packages of Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms cereal. When science teacher Sue Aronofsky opens the door of her classroom, kids stream into the hallway. “You go around, you get your stuff, and you tell the lady thank you,” she says. Students eat at their desks as announcements drone from the public-address system. After a brief pause to pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag and toss empty milk cartons, Aronofsky’s freshmen turn to examining pill bugs under magnifying glasses. Time: 8:45 a.m. The same scene occurs all over the 1,034-student school. Last year, when Centennial served free breakfast in the cafeteria each morning before the start of classes, fewer than 100 students showed up to eat daily. On this morning four days into the new year, with breakfast delivered to classrooms, 864 students have been fed. That many children eating school breakfast is rare. Although the number of hungry children in the U.S. is rising, fewer than half of the kids who could be eating a free or low-cost breakfast at school are getting one. TRAFFIC: Cities opt for creative commuter options COACHING: Qualified students aim higher ‘DROPOUT FACTORIES’: Program fights truancy at young age BACKYARD COTTAGES: Extra income in Seattle In Pueblo, school officials take a counterintuitive approach: They offer free breakfast to all children regardless of income, so no one is embarrassed to be eating it. In most schools here, breakfast is served right in the classrooms. As a result, 76% of Pueblo’s needy kids eat school breakfast. That’s more than any state and almost every big city, according to the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), which tracks participation in school meal programs. Now, states such as Colorado and Florida, anti-hunger groups and congressional lawmakers from both parties are pushing schools to follow programs such as Centennial’s — an effort not only to improve students’ performance in school but to combat rising hunger in tough economic times. The number of U.S. households that can’t consistently put food on the table rose to 17 million, or 14.6%, in 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture , the highest level in a decade. The use of food stamps is at an all-time high, and so is the percentage of children receiving free or reduced-price school meals, which rose from 59.3% in 2007 to 62.5% in 2009. DELINQUENTS: For D.C., hope in treating young offenders SOLAR CITY: Toledo reinvents itself as a solar-power innovator STAYING FREE: Unlikely mentors give felons hope The low number of needy kids eating breakfast at school “is a tremendous concern,” says Gary Davis, founder of the Got Breakfast? Foundation, which gives schools grants to increase breakfast participation. “It’s a message that really has to be heard: that there’s just a simple way that we can improve our society.” The cost of school breakfast for needy kids, such as the cost of their lunches, is eligible for federal reimbursement. Most U.S. schools — 86% — offer it. But of the nearly 19 million children who eat a free or reduced-price lunch at school, only 8.8 million also come for breakfast, according to FRAC. Efforts to change this are underway: •In Colorado, where only 39% of needy kids eat a school breakfast, Democratic Gov. Bob Ritter launched an effort in July to get school districts to increase participation in breakfast with the help of Share Our Strength, a national advocacy group that fights childhood hunger. •In Florida, a new law this year requires free breakfast in all schools where 80% of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals. •In Congress, renewal of the Child Nutrition Act would allow start-up grants for universal free breakfast programs. The bill also would make it easier for high-need schools to serve universal meals by allowing more ways for schools to make kids eligible for free and low-cost meals. The renewal, postponed from 2009, passed the Senate in August with $4.5 billion in increased funding. A version with $8 billion in additional funding awaits action in the House. The current law expires Sept. 30. “There are just a lot of kids whose families are not going to be able to supply all their meals for them,” says Bill Shore, co-founder of Share Our Strength. “The impact (on hunger) of adding 50,000 kids to the school breakfast program dwarfs anything else we could do.” ‘It’s the right thing to do’ In Pueblo — a city of 103,000 that is 104 miles south of Denver — 72% of schoolchildren qualify for free and reduced-price meals. Under U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, a family of four with an annual income of less than $40,793 can receive school meals at a reduced price of no more than 30 cents. A family of four with income less than $28,665 is eligible for free school meals. But in Pueblo, breakfast is served free to everyone in all 38 schools. In 24 schools, children are served breakfast in the classroom or, if the food carts can’t be hauled upstairs, kids grab breakfast at the front door on their way to class. Jill Kidd, Pueblo’s nutrition services director, started serving breakfast in class in 1998 in four of the district’s poorest schools, and she has been expanding the classroom breakfast program ever since. “It’s simple,” she says. “And it’s the right thing to do for kids.” Pueblo serves a burrito, French toast or other hot breakfast four times a week, and offers cereal every day, including an unsweetened variety such as Cheerios. (Centennial students got only sweet cereals the first week this school year because adding the school to the in-class breakfast program initially stretched district supplies, Kidd says.) Cheyenne Roque, 15, a freshman at Centennial, grabbed the high-fiber doughnut from the breakfast cart. Her mother works at a craft supply store and her dad at a discount store. The family includes three kids, her grandmother and uncle. Food stamps help the family make it through the month, but school breakfast and lunch make the groceries at home go further. “That’s why we have more food at home, because we eat breakfast and lunch at school,” she says. Removing the stigma Getting more kids to eat breakfast at school is key to achieving President Obama’s campaign pledge to end childhood hunger by 2015, according to groups such as Share Our Strength and Feeding America, a food bank network. The best way to do so, they say, is with a program like Centennial’s that feeds rich and poor kids alike. In a 2001 U.S. Department of Agriculture pilot program in 79 schools, offering free breakfast to all kids in the cafeteria increased the number of students who ate breakfast in school from 19% to 28%. At schools that served free breakfast in the classroom, participation rose to 65%. Feeding free breakfast to students who can afford to pay avoids the stigma for students who can’t but don’t want everyone to know. Serving breakfast in class means kids don’t have to get there early to be fed, Kidd and other school nutrition directors say. Bus schedules, parents’ work schedules, and, for high school students, the desire to sleep as late as possible make getting to school early for breakfast difficult. Andrea Ayala, 28, an unemployed single mom of four, grew up in Pueblo eating breakfast at school when it was for poor kids only. She and her four siblings “always had to go to the cafeteria and be there before school. … My mom made us,” Ayala says. Now her four kids eat breakfast at school along with everyone else, she says: “They see everybody else getting what they’re getting.” Feeding more children breakfast is an easy pitch to budget-squeezed school districts because if enough of their kids are eligible for low- or no-cost meals, federal reimbursement can cover the cost of the entire program. The more breakfasts they serve, the more federal reimbursement they get and the greater economy of scale they enjoy. The USDA spent $12.7 billion on school breakfast and lunch last year. Reimbursement to schools for breakfast range from 26 cents for a child who pays full price to $1.74 for a free breakfast in a high-poverty school. More than half of all students in Pueblo eat breakfast at school. The program pays for itself and doesn’t require any money from the district, Kidd says. “We aren’t asking taxpayers to feed every kid a free breakfast at school,” says Courtney Smith, director of Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry program. “We are saying that in very high-need areas, a way to effectively provide breakfast at school is through a universal breakfast program.” Part of an education In Pueblo, Kidd has converted schools to free in-class breakfast one principal at a time. Administrative reluctance is typically the biggest obstacle to classroom breakfast, its proponents say. Since the federal No Child Left Behind law made performance on state tests critical to schools, the pressure to maximize class time is intense. “As a principal, you have to guard instruction time,” says Tharyn Mulberry, Centennial’s principal. When he first mentioned classroom breakfast, his faculty “did not like it,” he says. “They did not want the disruption of it.” First, Kidd arranged to serve breakfast in class last year on the days when Centennial students took the all-important state assessment tests. Then she told Mulberry, “If it’s good for test days, it’s good for every day.” Studies indicate that children learn better when they aren’t hungry. Kids who eat breakfast right before taking tests score higher than kids who ate hours before. Results of pilot programs in the city of Milwaukee, statewide in Maryland and elsewhere show that serving breakfast in class results in less tardiness, less disruptive behavior and fewer visits to the nurse. “We’re a little obsessive about it at this point,” Kidd says. She has pitched one principal on the idea of in-class breakfast so many times — without success — “if I mention it again, he’s going to kill me.” At Park View Elementary, on Pueblo’s east side, where all 418 students qualify for free or reduced-price meals, breakfast is served only in the cafeteria, not the classroom. “I don’t feel that that truly is the best use of the instruction part of the day,” Principal Shiela Perez says. “By the time that it’s been delivered, by the time they’ve been given the opportunity to eat and everything’s been cleared up, that can drag out … into 45 minutes of the day.” Instead, children must arrive by 7:40 a.m. to eat, 20 minutes before class begins. A little more than one-third of the students — 37% — eat breakfast at school. “If they walk in at 7:55 they’re not going to get turned away,” Perez says. “We’re just trying to encourage them to get here.” Like it or not, making sure children get fed has become central to schools’ mission. Feeding hungry kids “is a given. We’re in many cases the biggest social support for our children,” says Stephanie Garcia, president of the Pueblo school board. “This is a necessary part of the educational process.” For Kidd, the next step in helping hungry children is to move beyond the school day. Like other schools, Pueblo has a program that sends bags of food home with needy kids on Friday to get them through the weekend. Kidd would like to add an after-school supper program, and start farmers markets at schools located in “food deserts,” neighborhoods without food stores. She is also now in charge of the 10% of Pueblo students who are homeless. It’s a job Kidd feels highlights the difference a school can make in a kid’s life, especially if it comes with decent meals. “We’re the safe time in their day. We’re the good time in their day,” she says. “If we can feed them and love them, maybe we can make the other 16 hours more tolerable.”

Since first lady Michelle Obama planted a garden at the White House in the spring of 2009 and invited schoolchildren to help tend and harvest the produce, more school gardens have been sprouting up across the country. Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announces it will award $1 million in grants for eligible high-poverty schools to start community gardens. The goal: to teach students about gardening and nutrition and to provide fresh produce for school meals. Some of the harvest may also be given to students’ families, as well as to local food banks and senior-center nutrition programs (www.fns.usda.gov). Improving nutrition in schools is part of the first lady’s Let’s Move! initiative to fight childhood obesity. OBAMA’S PROJECT: More on the Let’s Move! campaign SCHOOL LUNCHES: Chefs help make them healthier LATEST NEWS: Keep up with fitness and nutrition developments School gardens “give kids exposure to where food comes from and encourages them to try foods they might not otherwise try,” says Kevin Concannon, USDA undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services. They give teachers an opportunity to talk about soil, water, sun, health and science, and the gardens can be used for math and art programs, he says. Concannon has visited school gardens from Maine to Missouri to California. When a second-grade girl took him on a tour of her elementary school’s 2-acre garden in Riverside, Calif., she waxed eloquent about strawberries, he says, pointing out that they contain vitamin C. “This was music to my ears,” he says. Estimates suggest that about 15% to 20% of schools across the country have gardens, says Mike Metallo, president of the National Gardening Association, a non-profit group that provides gardeners and teachers with information and resources. Since 1982, the gardening association has given out 9,310 grants and awards worth $3.7 million, reaching 1.4 million young gardeners, he says (kidsgardening.org). “We’ve supported everything from small herb gardens at inner-city elementary schools to large, raised-bed vegetable gardens in middle schools,” Metallo says. The group is taking applications for its youth gardening programs, which are financed by corporations. “In most areas of the country, schools can do a spring garden and fall garden and get parents, kids and community volunteers to maintain them throughout the summer,” Metallo says. The gardening association also provides money for indoor gardening projects with light tables and curriculum, he says. “It teaches students about roots and stems and the process that is going on. A lot of times, they can grow lettuce and herbs quite easily. “Kids love to plant seeds. They love to watch them sprout and grow. It’s magical.”

Come fall, the ground beef used in school lunches will be as safe as ground beef sold to the nation’s fast food chains — a major improvement, critics say. The U.S. Agriculture Department announced Friday that it will require all ground beef purchased for the National School Lunch Program to adhere to new safety standards after July 1. The program supplies ground beef, chicken and other food for more than 31 million schoolchildren. The rules bring school lunches “right in line with contemporary standards,” says Dave Theno, a food safety consultant who developed a rigorous safety program for the Jack in the Box chain before retiring in 2008. “In fact, I’d make the case that the school lunch standards will now be above some of our major retail grocery chains. Not all, but some. They’ll be up there with the best.” LUNCH TROUBLE: See previous stories The department announced in February that it would raise standards for school lunches and has spelled those standards out in detail. The rules call for more stringent microbiological testing and say beef should be sampled every 15 minutes on production lines. Previously, ground beef bound for schools was sampled an average of eight times during an entire production day, and then those samples were combined and subjected to testing once a shift. The rules make suppliers with “a long-term poor safety record” ineligible to sell to the school lunch program without a complete analysis of why their products failed inspections, says Michael Jarvis, a spokesman for the USDA ‘s Agricultural Marketing Service, which purchases beef for the school lunch program. No currently eligible contractors would be ineligible under that requirement “if it were in effect,” he says. The standards “look very good,” says Carol Tucker-Foreman with the Consumer Federation of America. A former USDA administrator herself, she has long fought to raise the USDA’s meat safety requirements for school lunches. “The new standards announced today ensure our purchases are in line with major private-sector buyers of ground beef,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand , D-N.Y., who has pushed the USDA to raise its safety standards, said she was pleased with the announcement. “For too long, a McDonald ‘s hamburger has been safer for our kids than those served in some school cafeterias. I applaud the USDA for taking action today to protect millions of American schoolchildren,” she says. The standards come in the wake of a USA TODAY investigation in November and December that found failures in government programs meant to protect students from food-borne illnesses. The newspaper’s investigation showed that fast food companies such as McDonald’s and Jack in the Box had more rigorous programs for bacteria and pathogen testing than the USDA. The changes put the school lunch program back in the forefront of safety practices, a place it once held a decade ago. As the best companies in the industry continued to move forward, often in response to E. coli outbreaks at restaurants and the toll they took on sales, the school lunch program did not, USA TODAY found. The program will put pressure on the meat grinding companies supplying the school lunch program “to make absolutely certain that they have raw materials of the highest quality,” Theno says. “My guess is that most of the people that were supplying were already in compliance. But what this does is ensure that the products we’re supplying to our kids are as good as what’s available commercially.” The National Academy of Sciences , at the USDA’s request, is also reviewing AMS’ ground beef purchase requirements to provide recommendations on how the agency can best follow industry-recognized best practices. Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director of the non-profit Center for Science in the Public Interest, says it’s “good that USDA isn’t waiting to implement new standards until the NAS completes its review. These steps will push the meat industry to implement tough new testing for all products going into the school lunch program.” The announcement comes a week before AMS’ annual conference for contractors, meat suppliers and processors on changes and updates to its purchasing requirements, just before the yearly purchasing cycle begins. The meeting, to open Thursday in Kansas City, Mo., is “where people get into the nitty-gritty” on what USDA wants, says Les Johnson of Les Johnson Associates, a consulting firm that works with companies that sell to the AMS program. The new requirements don’t come as a surprise to the meat industry. “After the series of articles, a number of industry people I talked with expected the standards would be strengthened and changed,” Johnson says. “It will require additional inspectors, and they’ve got to pay USDA more to get it done. But, since the new rules apply to all suppliers, it doesn’t give anyone an advantage over the rest.” There may be some complaints that the new standards could make the school lunch program more expensive. Theno doesn’t buy it. “How can a guy offer a quarter-pound, 99-cent hamburger commercially if that’s the case?”