Agriculture education: a bumper crop of students.

After years of declining enrollment, the popularity of aged programs is again on the rise. The road to renewal has been paved from the barn to the mainstream, where the former farm-centered courses now offer infinite options of study to a diverse group of students.

When the pigs broke out of their pen and ran away, Jeremy Hart decided for the umpteenth time that he'd had enough of the family farm. He'd planned to plant pumpkins that day. Instead, he'd have to scramble after grunting animals and patch up the fences they smashed. Farm work was too much work, he thought. Better to find a less demanding job - one that actually allowed for time off.

Those dark thoughts galloped through Hart's head not so very long ago. But now he's 18, and the farm looks better to him than it used to. In fact, now that it's time to apply to colleges, he's thinking an agriculture degree might suit him just fine. He could become an agriculture teacher - and stay involved with farming.

"The older I get, the more I like ag," says Hart, a senior at Chatham Central High School in Bear Creek, North Carolina. "There are a lot of jobs out there. Whatever you want to do in ag, there's a job for it."

A bumper crop of high schoolers around the country is reaching the same conclusions, thanks, in part, to a dominant reality of the marketplace: at least 15 percent of today's jobs relate to agriculture, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Equally important have been revolutionary overhauls within agricultural education itself. Those programs once appealed only to dwindling numbers of boys in line to inherit family farms. Now the appeal is universal. Whether it's cloning African violets or tending to family pets, aged today bears little resemblance to programs of yesteryear.

"If we were to have kept the program we had 20 years ago, then we wouldn't have a program at all," says Merle Richter, agri-business instructor at Bloomer High School in Bloomer, Wisconsin.

In 12 years, the classes of agriculture teachers shrank 27 percent, yet they've survived and thrived upon changes as unpredictable to them as the renegade pigs were to the Hart family.

In 1920, nearly one of three Americans lived on a farm. In the 1930s, 6.3 million farms covered the landscape. Farmers and farming wove major patterns within the American fabric. The 1928 establishment of the Future Farmers of America, then the vocational agriculture program for boys, symbolized that. High school programs, served up in uniform series of Ag 1, 2, 3 and 4, taught boys how to raise crops and livestock, build equipment and operate machines. That's what was needed, and that's what was offered.

"In high school, when I took agriculture, we were out chasing cows," recalls Joe Stasulat, program manager of the Internship and Career Center of the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences at the University of California-Davis. By the late 1960s, when he entered college, the subject matter hadn't changed all that much, though the farm situation had. Farmers made up less than 15 percent of the population, and the 6.3 million small farms of 40 years earlier had shrunk to 3 million larger ones. Still they prospered, and that explains why agriculture education enrollments climbed into the 1970s, peaking in 1976-77 with 697,499 high schoolers enrolled in vocational agricultural programs. FFA (open to girls as well as boys since 1969) peaked that year also with 509,735 members.

New curriculum hybrids

The farm crisis hit soon after.

Shrinking markets, greater global competition, fluctuating land values and declining commodity prices poisoned the agrarian way of life. Corporations gobbled up countless farms, and kids vowed never to relive the hardships suffered by their parents. Today, just two of every 100 Americans live on farms compared with almost 30 percent of Americans a few decades ago. That reversal rocked ag programs as did consolidations of rural school districts and an increased emphasis on college prep courses.

"The administrators were saying, 'Where are your students? There are a lot of empty seats out there,'" recalls Stasulat of UC-Davis. By 1990, teens' interest in agriculture dropped to an all-time low. FFA membership had shrunk to 382,748, a 25 percent decline over 14 years. (High school ag enrollment bottomed out two years earlier at 506,674.) Clearly, a radical solution was called for. Successful programs found it. They swept agriculture out of the barn and into the mainstream.

"Even in this rural, dairy community, kids live in the country, but they don't live on farms," says Richter, the high school agri-business instructor in Bloomer, Wisconsin (population 3,000). Twenty-six years ago when he came to the school, 80 percent of his students came from farms. Fewer than half do today. Richter and colleagues - like countless others across the nation - creatively adapted their program to meet current students' needs. On a national level it's working - FFA members now number 449,814. Instead of "Vocational Agriculture," the yellow emblem on their blue jackets reads "Agricultural Education." At little Bloomer High School, Richter's classes are more popular than ever.

"We didn't come in and make a massive change," Richter insists. But over time, they did. The traditional four-year agriculture program sequence blossomed into a 17-class potpourri. Students can choose as many or as few as they wish, thanks largely to a new block scheduling system.

And what choices they have. Beef cattle, dairy cattle and hogs once ruled "Animal Science." Today, cats, dogs, birds, mice, rabbit, elk and other critters share curriculum space and spark youngsters' interest - particularly that of girls, who make up half the class - in veterinary careers. Topical material from the old, dry "Soils" class has been transplanted into more exciting courses on horticulture and landscaping, floriculture and greenhouses. About six years old now, the introductory course, "Exploring Agriculture through Nature," emphasizes woods and wildlife. It appeals to young people's interest in the outdoors the way its precursor, "Forestry," never did.

"Freshmen would look at that and say, 'Why should I want to learn about trees?' Richter recalls. "Power Mechanics," a course that drew a 95-percent male enrollment, fueled the creation of "Consumer Mechanics," where students learn the basics of engine maintenance and repair as well as related topics like insurance. Girls make up 75 percent of that class.

Ag's many roots

Agriculture mainstream-style lends itself to infinite options of study. In culturally diverse California, a move is afoot to create a garden in every public school in the state. Students could learn about Mexico, Asia and other lands by growing crops popular in those regions. Proponents also seek to include agriculture in every textbook on any subject offered in kindergarten through community college. Sound impossible? Not at all, says Richard Engel, project coordinator of the California Foundation for Agriculture in the Classroom.

Think of the Boston tea party, early American political debates, tobacco tax issues, commodity embargoes that helped embroil us in World War I. That's all history, isn't it? How about geography as an exploration of crops, such as the South American peanut that was introduced into Europe, then carried by later explorers into North America? Literature? Have students write about agriculture. If they can't think of a topic, tell them to write about what they ate for breakfast, or the clothes they selected that morning. As for physical education, obviously that's the arena of healthy diet and nutrition information.

"The agriculture industry is definitely held in higher esteem here now than before," Engel says. Conducive to that are flocks of agri-science and bio-tech recruiters that descend every year upon college campuses. Some leave with mission unaccomplished due to lack of qualified applicants. One California university recently built a multimillion-dollar facility to help train more dairypeople. Its construction was in response to the industry's inability to fill $50,000 management positions open to people right out of college. Nationally, jobs outnumber graduates. There is an approximate 4.5 percent surplus of jobs in agriculture, environmental studies and veterinary medicine, one federally funded study concluded.

The National FFA Organization (the modernized title of Future Farmers of America) blankets its chapters with videotapes and colorful brochures full of career opportunities for their members: cell biologists, patent attorneys, technical communications specialists, equine dentists, golf course superintendents and rural sociologists. Basic farmers are still needed, of course. Thanks to technology, even their coursework differs wildly from a generation ago.

"We don't even feed [animals] the way we used to," explains Julian Smith, agriculture teacher at Chatham Central High School. "It's technology based now." He teaches Jeremy Hart, the young man who is reconsidering his decision to bail out of farming.

When Hart's parents were young, many farmers fed livestock whatever seemed to work, usually whatever their own parents had used. Budding farmers in Smith's class today learn that it's most cost-effective to tinker daily with young chicks' feed for the first eight weeks of their lives. Students toil over problems involving cattle feed, prices and power, and use charts and calculators to plan the most economical menu for livestock.

"In the old days, you wouldn't even know what a feed did," says Smith, who adds that class time in "olden" days used to include lots of hands-on construction of trailers, sprayers and so forth. Farmers buy those things today. "You can't justify time to make them yourself," Smith says.

A diverse crop

Agriculture education still has a ways to go before regaining its glory, days - if it ever does. From a peak of perhaps 12,000, the number of high school programs fell to barely 7,000 and even now has climbed back to just 8,000 or so, says Marshall Stewart, agricultural education coordinator for North Carolina.

But even if it never regains its former size, vocational agriculture instruction today yields a bumper crop of well-rounded students, unsurpassed by any in years past. Girls account for nearly a third of those students - a presence unimaginable until quite recently. They've spurred the boys to study harder and have captured far more than their proportionate share of leadership positions in clubs and classrooms, teachers say.

Minorities - including teens in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and other cities - enroll in record numbers, drawn to the course selections regardless of whether they've set foot on a farm. At the corporate level, white men continue to dominate the top ranks, Stewart says. Girls and ethnic minorities will have bright futures as companies diversify their leadership.

And then there are the traditional farm boys, like Jeremy Hart. "I don't want to be at a desk in an office all day," the young man says earnestly. "I enjoy being outdoors and working with my hands."

It's a good thing for the rest of us that America still has people who feel that way. The world's population grows uncontrollably, and as the American Farmland Trust reports, even this country's population could increase 50 percent in 50 years. As urban development eats up hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland every year, the nation must continually improve its methods of raising foods and fibers on the fields that remain.

"People are always going to have to eat," observes Smith, Hart's teacher. "We'll always need people who can grow the foods."

And programs to teach them how to do it.

RELATED ARTICLE: Ag Gets Postsecondary Boost

The rising interest in agriculture education isn't limited to high school students. Universities, too, have attracted a diverse group of enrollees thanks to progressive changes in curriculum and industry demand for workers.

Enrollment in ag ed programs at land-grant colleges climbed to an all-time high of nearly 118,000 last summer, reported the Los Angeles Times. That' up from 64,000 in the late 1980s. The new student population is more than 50 percent urbanite, 40 percent female and 10 percent ethnic minority, according to the Food and Agricultural Education Information System, a clearinghouse based at Texas A&M University.

"We woke up a few years and said, 'He, no one's walking in our door,' Joe Stasulat, director of an agriculture internship program at the University of California-Davis, told the Times last July. So he, along with colleagues at ag schools around the country, overhauled the program.

Today's university-level agriculture programs lean much more toward lab-based research. Their students are just as likely to be studying genetically altered mice under fluorescent lights and engineering high-tech farm equipment than they are to be rotating crops. More undergraduates now study natural resources (such as urban forestry and range management) than study animal science.

University educators cite the availability of jobs as the top reason for the increase in ag enrollments. One California dean said industry demand outnumbers graduates by about 3 to 1.

Tibbett L. Speer is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.