FREMONT COUNTY FAIRGROUNDS—Bobby Lane moved with easy familiarity past booths on invasive weeds and animal feed during a farm and ranch expo in early February. As ranchers greeted him and made small talk, it was clear this was his milieu.
Lane, who wore crisp blue jeans and a baseball cap over his black hair, farmed his own 1,000-plus acres west of Riverton for decades, growing dry beans, corn, barley and alfalfa hay. He understands the challenges of irrigation and drought, soil science and yield. He knows how hard it is to make a living as a grower.
Unlike many others, however, farming was just the beginning of Lane’s career. It turns out his bigger passions lie in orchestrating projects, making connections and creating the infrastructure for more people to access and enjoy local food. It took him some years to tap into those strengths, but now that he has, he’s on a tear.
As Wyoming’s Farm to School coordinator since late 2023, he has overseen a stunning accomplishment. The number of school meals served that included Wyoming products exploded in 2024 to 40,000, up from under 2,000 in 2023, according to the Wyoming Department of Education.
“So we had a 2,000% increase in local food in schools,” Lane said. With the achievement, Wyoming won the 2024 Mountain Plains Region Crunch Off — which honors the state that can serve the most locally grown food bites per capita in lunchrooms. Wyoming beat out seven states to win, including previous champion Nebraska.
The championship resulted from a flurry of organizing, connecting and effort Lane poured into the program in his first year, said Carla Bankes with the Wyoming Department of Education, who supervises him.
“I think it just clicked for him that this was like his calling almost,” Bankes said. “He’s so genuine, and he’s just so excited to do this work. He’s very passionate about it because he was a producer in the state.”
When Lane took the job, he ran with it. Or, more accurately, drove. Because a large part of what he’s done is crisscross the state — popping in on school food service directors to extol the program, meeting with growers who have questions about how they can participate, helping cafeteria staff shuck corn, delivering beef steaks and seeking out every owner of every greenhouse he spots along the way to see if they too want to help feed Wyoming students. He has put many thousands of miles on his vehicle. And he loves it.
After 35 years working in agriculture and state government, Lane said, “this is by far my favorite” role.
“My passion for this is to make it very successful, and I want every state in the union to look at Wyoming as an example,” he said.
Farm adjacent
Lane moved to Riverton with his family as a teenager, and has spent most of his life there. He farmed while he and his wife raised their three children and took on additional jobs.
He went to work for the state in the ‘80s and ‘90s, both as a water rights specialist and water regulation officer, before going back to solely farming. In 2018, he melded his state agency experience with farming when he became the agriculture manager at the Wyoming Honor Farm. The Department of Corrections minimum-custody facility on the outskirts of Riverton is designed to give inmates work skills they can take into the civilian world.
One of those skillsets is agriculture. Under Lane’s leadership, the farm’s output mushroomed. The team of roughly 30 inmates he oversaw went from farming one acre to roughly nine. They grew sweet corn, squash, green beans, cucumbers and tomatoes. “We had more [produce] than we knew what to do with,” Lane said.
That led to a partnership with First Lady Jennie Gordon’s Wyoming Hunger Initiative — a happy accepter of surplus veggies. The Honor Farm funneled some 18,000 pounds of produce to the program over three years.
While the program was designed to teach inmates skills, “it was a learning experience for me as well,” Lane said. Among the things he gleaned was that he enjoys orchestrating food production to enable greater access to food. So becoming the Farm to School coordinator — a job he began in late 2023 — was a natural step.
Lane, who is a former competitive bodybuilder, has always been interested in health and wellbeing. But he’s found a new font of enthusiasm when it comes to fresh, local food for kids.
Where does corn come from?
In his role as Farm to School coordinator, Lane said it didn’t take long to realize a disturbing fact about many of the state’s students: Too many know too little about what it takes to produce food.
For example, he was surprised to learn that some kids had no idea corn kernels came packaged by nature on cobs and in husks — and not ready-made in a can.
“There’s so many kids in the state that don’t know where the food comes from,” Lane said. “You ask that question, and they say ‘the grocery store’ or ‘a can.’ And we want to change that.” Wyoming, after all, is a state with deep agricultural roots.
That path is peppered with challenges. Start with Wyoming’s harsh climate and northern latitude, which make a wide range of produce hard to grow — particularly during the months school is in session. Getting produce to lunch trays isn’t easy, either. School districts prepare thousands of meals daily, so they need to order items in advance and in enormous quantities.
“We started planning the menu for next year at the beginning of this month,” Natrona County School District Food Service Director Desiree McAdams said, illustrating the challenge. McAdams oversees 26 schools that serve nearly 5,000 daily lunches and roughly 2,000 daily breakfasts.
Not every gardener can furnish thousands of carrots, and not every food director can pay the premium for small-scale, local food.
With low levels of statewide participation, however, Lane saw plenty of room for growth.
In his first few months, he hit the road — introducing himself to farmers, meeting with school food service personnel and networking at local food events. And he found buy-in — both with growers and school districts.
McAdams of Natrona County participates in Farm to School. It’s something she had done prior to Lane starting, she said, but has scaled up since.
“He called me one day and asked if I was going to be in the office the next day,” she remembered, “and then he came in very excited about the program. He let us know all the things that he was going to try and make happen with it.”
Lane helped them learn about available grant funds, which McAdams used to purchase products like mushrooms, corn and beans.
Does local food transform kids into vegetable lovers? Maybe not. But it helps, McAdams said.
“For example, when I have lettuce that’s local on the salad bar … just telling them that it’s from Wyoming gets them to try it,” she said.
The education department asked Gov. Mark Gordon to proclaim a Farm to School Day. That offered an organizational anchor and drove momentum.
On the inaugural Farm to School Day, Oct. 2, 2024, WDE staffers helped serve Wyoming beef burgers in Burns and sweet corn in Arapahoe. Students ate lettuce and potatoes, tomatoes, oats and apples grown in the state. Kelly Bean of Torrington and Equality State Farms of Gillette donated 1,500 pounds of dried beans to the effort.
“The schools and childcare centers are just stepping up to the plate on this,” Lane said.
Infectious energy
Those who know him argue it’s Lane’s infectious energy that’s feeding the growth.
“His energy is contagious,” McAdams said.
Bankes of the WDE echoed that. “He makes you want to participate,” she said. “I think it’s his personality, his true love and genuineness.”
It helps that Lane was a farmer himself, Bankes said. “He’s super relatable for the producers. And then the food service directors just adore him because he takes the time to go to those districts.”
He’s not afraid to go anywhere in the state, she said, or to don an apron to pitch in with the work of processing or cooking.
“He’s very, very focused on getting farm-fresh food to our kids throughout Wyoming, which is pretty cool,” said farmer Lindsey Anderson. She and her husband grow sweet corn on their 1890 Farm north of Riverton. Through Farm to School, they sent truckfuls of corn to Wyoming schools this fall.
“For some of those kids, it was the first chance that they had to shuck the corn,” she said. “Some of them, it was the first time that they actually got to enjoy the sweet corn directly off the cob, which I think is pretty cool, because it provides that unique, authentic, farm-to-table experience for kids.”
Farm to School, which is funded by the federal Patrick Leahy Farm to School grant, aims to help child nutrition operators like schools or child-care centers to participate in a number of programs.
Lane’s job is grant-funded through 2026. Though many federal grants are currently in question due to President Donald Trump’s efforts to cut spending, the Wyoming Department of Education confirmed that it has secured all the funds.
A day in the life
On a Friday morning in February, Lane climbed into his gray F-150 truck and hit the road north to Powell. The truck has a service-boosting antennae affixed to it. That’s good, because it serves in many ways as Lane’s secondary office.
Before this trip, he was in Teton County talking about local beef and after it, he would head to Sheridan for a local food conference. Lane stores a pair of binoculars near his feet to scan the landscape for greenhouses that might lead to his next grower.
On this day, he drove to a small county extension building shrouded in new snow. Inside, he gathered with a handful of Park County farmers, school representatives and tourism folks to talk about Farm to School.
Participants discussed school budgets, contracts and planting schedules. They explored the impact of pricing on local food procurement, and talked about how farmers can be so busy that they can barely manage sleep, let alone extra paperwork. They heard from a food service director about how he thinks community interest is the key to a successful Farm to School program.
Lane told participants his job is mainly to get conversations started.
“I’m kind of like the couples coordinator,” he said. “I just get those relationships going.”
That was a bit of an undersell, said Andrea Alma, a USDA Farm to School regional specialist.
“Bobby is working hard to fill in that middle space … because in Wyoming, we know it’s so vast,” Alma said.
Alma asked the group to guess how many school lunches are served in Wyoming annually. Participants grossly underguessed.
“Six million lunches in just one school year,” she said. “So like the magnitude, the scale of what these school nutrition professionals are dealing with, is a lot, but also, this is a pretty significant marketplace for you all.”
Lane is confident he’ll help get more Wyoming food into schools in 2025.
“I don’t plan on giving the [Crunch Off] trophy back to Nebraska anytime soon,” he said.
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