Baker’s beef bounty

Beef brings more dollars to Baker County than any other agricultural commodity.

But until recently, local beef was conspicuously absent from one place: the menus of the county’s public schools.

Baker County ranchers intend to correct that oversight.

The Baker County Livestock Association has offered to supply beef to every school in the county.

Their generosity coincides with budget cuts that have forced some schools to trim meat from their menus and remove some cooks from their kitchens.

Jean Dean, food services manager for the Baker School District, the county’s largest, said the donated beef could help the district balance its food budget for the first time in several years.

The beef-for-schools campaign started in the Pine-Eagle District in eastern Baker County.

In January, Dan Forsea, president of the Livestock Association, and fellow ranchers Meb Dailey and Dwight Saunders donated three cows to the Pine-Eagle District.

Superintendent Mike Corley said the district had been spending $3,000 to $4,000 per year to buy ground beef.

The donations to Pine-Eagle prompted other ranchers to suggest expanding the program to the rest of the county.

Besides helping financially ailing schools, the ranchers’ philanthropy benefits the environment by eliminating the need for schools to have beef hauled to the county in exhaust-spewing trucks.

We suspect parents also will appreciate knowing where the beef their kids eat came from.

There’s even a lesson in this for the students: Take them for a drive in the country and show them where their hamburgers got their start.