photo by: Journal-World File Photo

The Pinckney building at 810 W. Sixth St.

With help from a nearly $100,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant, the Lawrence school district plans to create a bakery in the former Pinckney Elementary building that will produce locally sourced grain products for school meals.

The $99,958 grant is one of 49 grants awarded around the state as part of the USDA AMS Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure Program. It’s an initiative intended to strengthen local and regional food systems by creating new revenue streams for farmers, according to the Kansas Department of Agriculture’s website.

Julie Henry, the district’s director of nutrition and wellness, said in a release on Wednesday that the district would spend the next year purchasing and installing equipment at Pinckney, developing recipes and hiring a manager. She said that the bakery’s staffing would be paid for through the money the district saved by making baked goods in-house.

“The bakery will increase the quality of grain products that we will be able to provide to our students and give us more flexibility and space for creativity with recipe development in the future,” Henry said.

The release said the district would commit to purchasing a minimum of 51% of its grain from small and mid-sized local and regional producers. The grain purchases will be part of the district’s existing Farm to School process, which the district already uses to source beef, fruits and vegetables for its meal programs.

In addition, the release said, the bakery would provide job training for students with disabilities in the district’s Community Transition, or C-Tran, program, which is also housed in the Pinckney building.

According to a news release from the Kansas Department of Agriculture, several other area entities received funding from the USDA AMS Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure Program. They include: Buck’s Honey Bee Company LLC and South Baldwin Farms LLC, both in Baldwin City; Irvine’s Just Beyond Paradise LLC, Juniper Hill Farms, Pantaleon Florez and Z&M Twisted Vines, all of Lawrence; and Kansas Bee Farm LLC, Berryton.

The amount of funding these entities received was not immediately available.