Ag Link provides school children with access to a variety of locally sourced, in-season fruits, vegetables, and proteins.

We connect local producers to California K-12 School Foodservice buyers and providers.

Ag Link, Inc. is a family-owned food hub in Ballico, California, built to do one thing: serve as the link between California farms and California school cafeterias.

The Nairn family’s roots run four generations deep in Merced County, where Jana’s great-grandparents settled as fig farmers in the early 1900s. Jana was born and raised in Ballico, the daughter of Jim and Karen Barstow, almond farmers and small business owners in the area from the 1960s through 2015. She met her husband, Rob, at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and together they have run agricultural businesses in Ballico since 2000 and continued the family tradition as active members of their small, rural community, heavily involved in the local school district and in community activities supporting local children, including Scouts, 4-H, and Little League.

The Nairns’ K-12 chapter began around 2010. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act had just put child nutrition squarely in the national spotlight, and school food service directors were suddenly being asked to put fresher, more varied produce on the tray. At the time, most of that produce arrived through broadline distributors: apples, oranges, bananas, and not a great deal beyond that. School food service directors started saying, “We are going to need a much more diverse supply of fresh produce to meet this.”

Jana and her husband, Rob, looked at the situation and based on their diverse ag backgrounds and work experience, saw an opportunity to support California farmers and provide great, fresh produce to California schoolchildren. Ballico sits in the middle of the Central Valley, within reach of three of California’s major growing regions, in a state that harvests something fresh nearly every month of the year. They concluded early on that there was no good reason California schools shouldn’t have variety and abundance of fresh produce available all year round.

So, they started working on both ends of the problem at once: talking with schools about what they needed and talking with growers about what they could supply. By 2012, Ag Link had committed to California K-12 school food service exclusively. More than a decade later, that is still all the company does.