While not completely successful, for reasons beyond the
project participants control, the Navajo Farm to School Project has positioned 15
Navajo producers of traditional crops- corn, squash, melons, and selected
vegetables - greens and tomatoes to sell their food items not only to schools but other
institutional buyers (senior centers, hospitals, nursing homes, and detention centers) as well as local grocery stores, casinos, and farmers’ markets patrons.
Major challenges the project participants faced included:
(1) school personnel not fully conversant with the legal requirements for
purchasing food from local producers, (2) difficulties in getting a DUNS
number for the project producers because they lived on the reservation and did
not have a physical mailing address, and (3) the project producers' loss of
their crops due to contamination of their irrigation water by an EPA toxic waste spill into the San Juan river.