Minnesota Schools Sort Food Scraps, Sends to Farm for Pig Feed

Bel Air Elementary School in New Brighton, Minn. is making sure that food scraps don’t go to waste after everyday lunches. Instead, those scraps are headed straight to the farm.

The elementary school is part of a network of 220 other locations, including hospitals, grocery stores, prisons, and other schools, that separates its food scraps in bins. Those scraps are then collected by trucks and taken to Barthold Farms in St. Francis where is it heated to 212 degrees, to kill off bacteria, then fed to over 2,000 pigs.

"It's really good because we can help save the environment and feed the pigs at the same time," said Albert Davis Jr., a third-grader at Bel Air.

"It's really a win-win," said Heather Schmidt, the nutrition services supervisor for the Mounds View school district, which plans to expand the program into high schools soon. "And it's been amazing to see the buy-in from the kids. If you give them the opportunity to do good and help save the Earth, they want to take it."

The trucks pick up roughly 150 to 200 cans of food a day which totals around 40,000 pounds of pig food daily.

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