Farm Futures: Ag programs survive by reinventing themselves for the 21st century 

Pop star Joni Mitchell warned us 30 years ago, and by now it’s increasingly clear. In California, the nation’s most productive agricultural state, we’ve paved paradise — and we’re losing millions of acres of farmland in the process.

Between 1980 and 1995, 120,000 acres of Central Valley farmland were converted to non-agricultural use, according to the California Farm Bureau, which predicts the loss of another million acres by 2040 if growth continues at the present rate.

Although farms and farmland are rapidly disappearing throughout California, agricultural education in the state’s K-12 public schools is not. In fact, programs aimed at reconnecting students and teachers to the land and living things are multiplying. Enrollment and course offerings are up in agriculture-related high school career and technical education courses, which include specialized training in horticulture, landscaping, machine repair and maintenance, beef production, forest management, and agricultural-based biology and engineering courses.

Students at all grade levels – elementary to post-secondary – are cultivating school gardens, composting, restoring wetlands, studying resource conservation and eating healthy lunches that feature locally grown produce as part of a growing network of farm-to-school programs.

Much of the expansion of agriculture-related programs is occurring in urban and suburban districts, attracting students from diverse backgrounds who have never before set foot on a furrowed field or driven a tractor. Agriculture education programs are flourishing in the farm-rich Central Valley, as one might expect, but also in Elk Grove in the metropolitan Sacramento area, where students are enrolling in ornamental horticulture and floriculture. Even schools located in areas where open space is scarce can develop successful programs.

With an estimated 10 percent of all California jobs related to agriculture (but less than 1 percent producing food), it makes obvious economic sense for the state to maintain a strong agricultural curriculum. But it’s not just about jobs.

“How we educate our students is going to affect how our resources are used in the future,” says Cary Trexler, a former high school agriculture teacher from Fullerton and assistant professor at the University of California at Davis’ teacher credential program. “We have an increasing urban population; we’re losing contact with the land. We no longer understand the implications of the choices we make about the food we eat.”

Dan Desmond, 4-H advisor with the UC Cooperative Extension in El Dorado County, who co-authored an extensive international study of “garden-based learning” for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, says most children have no idea how their food gets to the table. “There is quite a bit of research that indicates that children know little about where their food and fiber comes from and even less about the ecological processes that make this food available,” he says. “That is probably one of the reasons we are paving the best farmland in the world and developing in a manner that is totally unsustainable long-term.”

The recent state budget crisis combined with state and federal pressures for a universal college preparatory curriculum that emphasizes standardized test scores has proved disastrous to many other career and technical or vocational education programs.

State enrollment in vocational education has been dropping by about 25,000 students a year for more than a decade, as more and more districts shut down costly machine shops and home economics kitchens to focus on traditional academics. In fact, some agricultural education teachers interviewed for this story spoke sadly about inheriting equipment for their agricultural mechanics, fabricating and machine courses from defunct high school shops.

Agricultural education supporters say they continue to worry about the impacts of the state budget deficit, which they expect to continue hitting local districts hard at least for the next few fiscal years.

In addition, the Bush Administration is advocating a plan to cut federal vocational education Carl Perkins Funds and funnel the money into broad block grants to finance the academic goals in the President’s No Child Left Behind Act. Proposals to dramatically increase academic qualifications of all public school teachers as part of NCLB also threaten AgEd programs.

Nonetheless, enrollment in high-school agricultural education courses continues to inch upward after a decade of slow decline. More students are joining the state Future Farmers of America, which, in another sign of the times, has officially dropped the “farmer” from its title and is now officially known as “The California FFA Association.”

Last year, 54,000 California students in grades nine through 12 were enrolled in agricultural education courses, a subject area that includes a broad range of subjects not traditionally associated with farming per se: like marketing, leadership and public speaking. That’s an increase of more than 20,000 students in the past 20 years.

High school agriculture education, or AgEd, has undergone a gradual but extensive transformation during that same period, mirroring changes both in public school curriculum and achievement goals and in the state’s agricultural industry and economy. Today’s agricultural education courses are likely to offer “Ag communications,” “Ag law” or floriculture alongside beef production entrepreneurship, animal care and dairy production.

“People tend to limit their thinking on ag education to just cows and plows,” says Gina Boster, assistant principal at Norco High School in Riverside County, who ran that school’s agriculture program for 13 years. “When you look at production agriculture – sure it’s a multi-million business in this state, but the infrastructure that supports that production is so much broader, so much bigger.” Norco’s program teaches floral design, forestry, landscaping and construction skills because the local economy is moving from agricultural production to building subdivisions (or, as Boster says, from growing crops to “growing houses.”)

There are other indications of an AgEd resurgence.

Two years ago, UC Davis, once known as “The Farm,” had all but abandoned its teacher credential program. But last year, the school revived and redesigned the program – moving it from the School of Agriculture to the School of Education. The university is also reinstating its agricultural undergraduate major, will offer a doctoral degree in education with specialization in agricultural education and has committed to continue designing AgEd curriculum for “kindergarten through adult,” says Trexler.

Even with the larger credential programs for agriculture teachers at four California State University campuses, the state – which is leading the nation in agriculture education innovation – cannot produce enough teachers to keep pace with the demand.

Last year, California had 665 secondary agriculture teachers and 82 vacancies. The state’s five credential programs produce between 50 and 60 agriculture teachers a year.

Agricultural educators, with the help of UCD faculty, have successfully infused academic standards into AgEd course offerings, ensuring that basic agricultural sciences courses meet entrance requirements for both UC and the California State University system and high-school graduation. The Foundation for Agriculture in the Classroom, a private nonprofit organization that works closely with the state, is developing a standards-based, K-12 curriculum that is expected in spring 2004. There are dozens of other programs that have developed materials to help teachers teach about food production and agriculture-related topics, including UC’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program at Davis, LifeLab at UC Santa Cruz and the San Francisco-based Project for Food, Land and People.

For the past two decades, high-school and community college agriculture teachers have tried to stay abreast of California’s many sweeping curriculum changes.

“We’ve got teachers on the staff who are involved with all the state curriculum projects,” says Hugh Mooney, secretary of the California Agriculture Teachers’ Association, who has run the agricultural education program at Galt High School since 1990. “You’ve got to be pushing the envelope to have the type of curriculum you can get through the UC approval process.”

Mooney says agriculture education programs at high schools throughout the state also work closely with local advisory committees to ensure that course offerings reflect the cutting edge of agriculture-related employment and industry trends.

“An area, for example where greenhouse production is a big deal, is going to have a real strong ornamental horticulture program,” he says. “If you get up in the far northern parts of the state where livestock production is big, they might have curriculum in the junior or senior year that targets specifically beef cattle production or dairy production.”

Thanks to strategic advocacy in Sacramento, agricultural education also enjoys an advantage that other career and technical programs lack: the program is written into the state Education Code. Nearly 20 years ago, advocates for agricultural education successfully sponsored legislation that requires the Department of Education to maintain a fully staffed agricultural education career technical unit and created an Agricultural Vocational Incentive program to help local districts pay for agricultural education courses. Last year local districts applied for and received more than $4 million from this fund. And while staffing is down in CDE’s other vocational and technical career advisory units, AgEd has its own unit with nine full-time employees.

Agricultural education supporters also convinced the Legislature to pass a law requiring the state to create a permanent agricultural advisory board that includes representatives from industry and education to oversee the state’s agricultural education programs.

Lee Murdock, a consultant with the California Department of Education who has fought a losing battle to preserve vocational education programs for much of his decades-long career, says agricultural educators have their collective act together. “AgEd is doing better because it is so well-organized,” he says. “Industry, agricultural education teachers, CDE, public universities and state colleges, local advisory committees: they are all in it together. Theirs is a wonderful program that involves the local communities in districts and attracts a real cross section of students: both the valedictorians and those that have struggled academically.”

Agricultural educators say studying the land and living things – and getting the rare opportunity to learn by doing – can successfully engage both straight-A students and their classmates who are struggling with school and life.

“We have a really high population of special education students, and we also have a lot of what you would consider the ‘at-risk’ students,” says Robin Grundmeyer, chair of agricultural education for Norco High School, an expanding program with 600 students enrolled. “I think they’re successful because they get the freedom to learn in a hands-on environment where they get to put into practice some of the things they learn in a book … They don’t have to sit still and takes notes everyday in class.”

Lynn Martindale, who taught agricultural science and leadership at Lemoore Union High School just outside Fresno for 17 years, is helping train agriculture teachers as part of the revived credential program at UC Davis. She says agriculture classes are among the few electives left standing in a curriculum focused on academic standards and test scores. “These classes may be the only ones left to give students an opportunity to get up and do something,” she says. “Students may have a chance to move around, work with animals or get out in the field.”

Bill Hedrick, a board member with the Corona-Norco Unified School District, said the board wholeheartedly supports Norco’s AgEd programs because it’s so valuable to area students and local employers.

“It is a comprehensive work-ethic-oriented program that puts students in contact with animals and nature,” Hedrick says. “It builds character, academic skills and skills that will help these students get jobs later on. Niche programs like these keep some students in school, who frankly, might otherwise not stay. Instead, they remain in school and flourish. Because of its strong connection with programs like 4-H and FFA, AgEd ties students to the school, and that spills over into other academic areas.”

There are a host of other agriculture and resource management programs that connect students with agriculture and operate in conjunction with local districts but are not staffed by school or state employees. These are programs like the FARMS project in Yolo County just outside Sacramento, and the California Food, Land and People project, which are supported by state and private funds.

The FARMS leadership project recruits students from diverse ethnic, economic and academic backgrounds to participate in sustainable agriculture and resource preservation projects. “I see us as the next generation of Ag Education,” says FARMS director Mary Kimball. “We focus on sustainability, the environment and on how all these factors influence each other.” In the past decade, FARMS high-school program has grown from five schools in Yolo County to include students in dozens of high schools and nine sites throughout the state.

Agricultural education curriculum also gives younger kids and older students who are not specializing in agriculture a chance to get their hands dirty and still focus on academics. In the early 1900s, school gardens were a regular part of many school curriculums. In 1916, more than 1 million American schoolchildren helped grow food for the war effort. Others grew “Victory Gardens” during World War II and the next generation of hippie kids grew their own food on communes.

Today school gardens are making yet another comeback.

The number of school gardens in the state has jumped from 1,000 to about 3,000 since 1995, when then-state Schools Superintendent Delaine Eastin launched the campaign to plant a garden at every school. Berkeley restaurateur Alice Waters gave the issue national publicity when she started “The Edible Schoolyard,” a project in which Berkeley junior high school students grow, harvest, prepare, serve and eat the food grown in their one-acre garden.

Deborah Tanammaie, who supervises the state’s school garden programs, said a recent survey showed that nearly 90 percent of principals from schools that have gardens say their primary reason is academic. Many school garden proponents – including educational visionary John Dewey – say the physical and mental effort required to produce food can teach children broader lessons about life.

Some schools have been especially creative.

In his UN report on garden-based learning, Desmond described a project at the Evergreen Elementary School in West Sacramento that offered small plots of land to the immigrant parents of students, who were primarily non-English-speaking families from rural Hmong and Mien cultures.

In the process of growing food, parents got involved with the school. Desmond reported that the project boosted the children’s self-esteem and was also good for their parents, who had an opportunity to demonstrate their farming skills and become teachers themselves.

Farm-to-school partnerships that bring fresh produce to school lunchrooms are also on the increase, along with obesity-fighting programs to reduce the amount of fast food and sugared soda sold on school campuses.

A coalition of local family farmers, parents and staff at the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program in Davis (which suffered significant cuts in the latest round of budget reductions), spent years putting together a salad bar program that now operates in three Davis elementary schools. It’s one of a growing number of California programs. These lunch programs generally include a broad farming, nutritional and environmental curriculum that includes a school garden, composting and field trips to local farms. Architects of the Davis program have written an extensive case study of their project, designed to help other schools institute similar programs.

Ann Evens, nutrition education consultant with CDE, says the department has noticed an increase in interest in such programs. This year CDE co-sponsored two, two-day workshops with the Community Alliance with Family Farmers to help district food service directors set up similar programs and plans more for 2004. The department also provides technical assistance for teachers interested in planting school gardens and is administering a $4 million grant to fund pilot projects in 12 districts aimed at getting California-grown produce into school cafeterias.

In addition to healthier food, AgEd proponents say, today’s youth need a broader worldview.

“In the developed world, children are increasingly addicted to technology,” says school-garden proponent Desmond of the UC Cooperative. “Their world is filled with monitors for television, video games, and computers. Their daily schedule is programmed and they are absorbed in a virtual reality that sometimes isolates them from their biological or ecological roots.”

Important as this “virtual world” is, Desmond adds, it’s not enough. 

“For some students, a school garden may be the only way to experience the environment in a holistic way,” says Assistant UC Davis Professor Trexler. “They may grow up assuming that milk comes directly from the market. We need to teach kids that what we eat and how we manage resources have an impact.”

Carol Brydolf is a staff writer for California Schools.