Farm-to-school programs around the country have wrestled with the challenge of sourcing local meat. To explore this question, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, in partnership with the Northeast Iowa Food and Fitness Initiative and Iowa Food Hub, sought to build a meat-to-school program in northeast Iowa. This series of three publications provides highlights of the project's successes and challenges, on the topics of sourcing products, working with pork producers, and working with beef producers. In this publication, Iowa Food Hub reviews their search of a system that could source pork at a price point acceptable to schools.

In 2014, they decided to test out an unlikely solution: the procurement and processing of "off-matrix" hogs.