(rapping: Jennifer: FFA members, why are we here?)
In Chicago, a special meeting of an FFA chapter to order.
(Students chanting): To practice brotherhood, honor agriculture opportunities and responsibilities, and develop those qualities of leadership that an FFA member should possess.
Membership in FFA has increased 20 percent since 2000, to more than half a million members across the country. It has 17,000 members in Illinois.
But there’s a reason why FFA no longer calls itself Future Farmers of America.
Actual farmers make up just about two to four percent of the American work force. But people who work in related industries that depend on what farmers do accounts for at least a quarter of the entire work force. That includes everyone from people in food services jobs to Kraft executives to commodities traders.
This FFA chapter is at the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences.
(Bring up flower show ambi)
Its members were at the Chicago Flower and Garden Show to exhibit a garden they designed and built, and to sell food produced in the school’s kitchens.
Applications to the public school – located on the far south side of the city – have almost doubled in the past year. Student Justice Plummer wasn’t so sure about agriculture when she first found out she got in.
Justice: My mom’s like ‘Go here’ and I’m like ‘No’ and then my mom’s like ‘Go here, you will never get an experience like this somewhere else’. So I picked this school.
Niala: Is your family involved in this?
Justice: Nooo nooo I’m the first, everybody looks at me like, Agriculture? They just think of farming.
Justice has learned a little about actual farming – the school does have one – but mostly concentrated on the business of agriculture.
Corey Flournoy is one of the high school’s newest instructors – he is in charge of its center for urban agricultural education. It’s a partnership with the University of Illinois.
Corey: Looking just here in Chicago – some of the largest food companies are based here – from Quaker Oats to Kraft Foods – the opportunities to work in agriculture – because those are agricultural companies – are plentiful. And we need more people to go into those fields.
Educators like to use the acronym STEM to describe this need for people who know science, technology, engineering and manufacturing.
Kramer: I say that agriculture puts the STEAM into STEM.
Laurie Kramer is an associate dean at the U of I’s College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. I asked her how much farming part was of the college’s curriculum.
Laurie: (Laughs) You would think big. But nowadays, things are very very different. The number of farms – especially those operated by families – is very small. And it’s very expensive to run those operations, it’s very tricky.
(bring up four-wheeler sound: This was my fall project, it was the irrigation)
Part-time farmer Howard Haselhuhn is on his four-wheeler heading towards a few acres of hops he’s planted at his farm in western Michigan.
He’s an electrical engineer for Texas Instruments. But the farm has been in his wife, Amy’s family, for several generations. She’s a CPA. When they were first married, Amy says they thought about farming full-time, but
Amy: We just didn’t see how we could possibly make a living off of a farm that was this size and growing commodity crops and also make payments off the land.
Together, the couple saved for 25 years to buy the 420-acre land from the rest of her family. Most of it is rented out to full time farmers. But on the weekends, they make the three and a hour trek west from their house near Ann Arbor to check on their hops crop.
More than half the farms in the Michigan area are what the USDA considers residential or lifestyle farms – meaning that the owners have other full-time incomes. Another 20 percent are retirement farms – what the Hasselhuhns hope this will be.
The farm was started in the 1930s by Amy’s great-grandfather. She says growing up on the farm gave her strong attachment to the land that Howard now shares. And even though they didn’t grow up there, her children have it, too – that weekend, her eldest son and his wife were also up at the farm, helping out.
For Changing Gears, I’m Niala Boodhoo.
