Pass the peas please: buying locally grown produce for use in state park restaurants makes just about everyone happy.

• Author: Robbins, Leslie Teach
• Position: Greenbo Lake State Resort, Kentucky

Visitors at the Greenbo Lake State Resort in Kentucky get more than pizza, hotdogs and nachos when they visit the dining room in the Jesse Stuart Lodge. Instead, they find just-picked tomatoes on the salad bar and pies made fresh with homegrown berries.

All the produce on their plates was delivered by a lucky local farmer who's a member of the Kentucky Proud program. He's been teamed with the restaurant's chef who plans menus around the fruits and vegetables to be harvested that week. The farmer is lucky because there's no middle man. His produce sells for better prices than he could get selling to a cooperative or a distributor. Only a year ago, the state parks chefs would have ordered their produce from a wholesaler.

Kentucky has 17 resort-style parks (more than any other state) with lodges, cabins and dining rooms run by state employees. In other states, food service is usually contracted out to large corporate management companies like Aramark or Sodexho.

Bob Perry, director of food service for Kentucky State Parks, couldn't be more perfect for the job. He's a chef and a gardener and he lives on Iris wife's family faint. As chef, Perry is dedicated to using the freshest and highest quality produce available. As gardener, he saw immediately that there was a market open for family farms. "We are estimating that we'll spend over $500,000 on produce for parks in 2005," he says, "and that money should go back to local farmers."

The Department of State Parks works with the State Department of Agriculture's direct marketing program, "Kentucky Proud," bringing a lucrative new market to local produce growers. The move was possible because the legislature in 2002 amended the state's procurement code to allow state agencies to support local agriculture. It exempted agricultural products from the competitive bidding process. As a result, the state park restaurants and three cafeterias in state government buildings in Frankfort purchase produce directly from local farmers.

Each week, prices are established by averaging the prices at several different wholesale companies. The parks continue to pay a wholesale price that keeps them within their budget, but the local farmer gets a higher price than he would elsewhere.

Park chefs use a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. In a typical month, a dining room might serve 30 or more different kinds of produce including lettuce, tomatoes, melons, berries, peppers, green beans, corn, cabbage, pumpkins and...