Below is a story NPR ran a story this morning on the increase in urban and suburban kids' interest in joining FFA.
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No
Plows, Cows, Sows: Not Your (Grand)Father's Youth Farm Group
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by
Luke Runyon
A
record number of kids are donning the blue corduroy jacket of FFA, formerly known as
Future Farmers of America. The jacket is an icon of rural life — the
organization is sort of like Boy Scouts for farming, and it dates back to the
1920s.
Even
though fewer and fewer young people grow up on farms these days, the
extracurricular activity is attracting more urban and suburban kids
interested in food and agricultural science.
Eighteen-year-old
Reece Melton unlatches the fence leading into a muddy pen at the St. Vrain
Valley School District's working farm in Longmont, Colo., near Denver.
"You
wouldn't think there's a livestock facility back behind here," Melton
says. He's president of the district's FFA chapter, and takes care of the
farm's cows, goats and pigs during school hours.
From
2007 to 2012, the U.S. lost almost 100,000 farms, according to recent census data.
During the same period, FFA enrolled an additional 60,000 students, and
opened new chapters, bringing the organization to its highest number of
students in its almost century-old history, just shy of 580,000.
That's
a lot of blue corduroy jackets.
Unlike
FFA members of the past, Melton didn't grow up on a farm. His parents did.
And that's the norm for the 60 other students in his chapter.
"We're
in an urban area, so most of our members do not grow up on property, though
they still have that connection to agriculture," he says.
But
because most millennials are several generations removed from the farm, the
school district is going to great lengths to make agriculture appeal to more
students.
Lauren
Hart, the district's FFA adviser and an agriculture instructor, says in her
eight years of teaching, she has noticed a shift. A greater number of
students are interested in organic farming methods, grass-fed beef and
cage-free eggs. And Hart says she can't just ignore what students want to
learn about.
"The
interest and the ability both of students going into production agriculture
is declining," she says. "It's just not something that a high
school student either wants to or believes they can get into."
That's
why Hart reaches into areas you wouldn't typically associate with farming —
law, public policy, entrepreneurship and bookkeeping. And that's something
that doesn't always sit well with a few students' parents who hail from farm
country.
They
say, " 'When are you going to have my student on a tractor?' " Hart
says. "Well, never."
FFA's
CEO, Dwight Armstrong, says programs like Hart's are taking off. And the
changing focus appears to be working. Suburban and inner-city chapters in
places like Chicago, Philadelphia and New York are some of the
fastest-growing in the country.
"The
perception is that FFA is plows, cows and sows," Armstrong says.
"Now we talk about not vocational agriculture but the science of
agriculture and the science of food."
And
reframing agriculture into food science begins to point students on more
stable career paths, he says — something that couldn't be said during the
1980s farm crisis. That's when enrollment numbers slumped, the name went from
Future Farmers to FFA, and the group's survival mode mantra became
"adapt or die."
Back
at the school farm in Longmont, Melton and his classmate are planning a coop
for a flock of fast-growing chickens. Both have the iconic FFA blue corduroy
jackets hanging in their closets at home.
At
first, Melton says, he griped about wearing it. "It's definitely not the
most stylish outfit," he says. "But it's something that's more
relative to tradition."
It's
the one tradition that's held on while everything around it changed.
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