The Suffolk school district is considering whether to apply for federal funds to purchase more locally grown produce for school lunches, a district administrator says.

District Food and Nutrition Services Supervisor Brian Williams joined a U.S. Department of Agriculture online seminar on its Farm to School program Thursday.

Grants and technical assistance under the program, funded by Congress’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, help eligible districts provide menus incorporating more locally grown foods.

Several factors, including price and logistics, preclude Suffolk schools from using more local produce, Williams said.

“Currently we can get produce delivered to each school,” he said. “You would have to have farmers deliver directly to each school.”

Williams disagreed that buying from local farmers would result in more healthy, less-processed meals. “The items that we would buy from local farmers would be basically the same that we would get from the produce companies now,” he said.

The district currently uses a handful of food providers, including Sysco, which reported $37 billion in sales for fiscal 2010; Richmond Restaurant Service, whose website says it plies its trade across more than half of Virginia from an Ashland warehouse with a fleet of 28 trucks; and Produce Source Partners, which has one of three bases in Newport News.

Williams rejected one of the locally grown food movement’s major arguments: that less energy is used in transportation, equaling good news for the environment.

“You are going to have to get produce from outside because Suffolk doesn’t supply all the produce that we would use, especially out-of-season foods which come from California and Florida,” he said.

“The major advantage is for the … local farmers, because the produce that we’re getting now is basically the same.”

In a press release, USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan stated that school cafeterias are well placed to teach children about where the food they eat comes from, something that often goes unexamined in an age of plastic-wrapped meat trays and bags of frozen vegetables.

“More and more, schools are connecting with their local farmers, ranchers and food businesses each day, and these programs are a great way to bring more local offerings into school cafeterias and support U.S. producers as well,” she stated, adding that it was also a way to fight the specter of childhood obesity.

Of the $5 million USDA will receive annually for Farm to School starting in October, $3.5 million will be awarded in grants and $1.5 million used for training, technical assistance and administrative costs, with the left over funding additional grants.

Grants are expected to range from $20,000 to $45,000 for planning, which Williams said the district would apply for initially, and $65,000 to $100,000 for implementation.

While grant applicants are required to contribute at least 25 percent of the cost of Food to School projects, Suffolk’s 2012-13 budget allocation for food as adopted by the School Board has dipped almost 4 percent from a revised $3.345 million for the current year to $3.2 million.

But Williams indicated that a joint-district application is one way Suffolk could afford it.

“You can also go in as a collaborative effort, and I’d like to discuss it with surrounding districts,” he said.