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Urban high school ag education programs are popular
Students from Omaha’s Urban Ag Academy recently visited a farm near Lincoln. For many of them, it was their first time on a farm.
Agriculture education programs are blooming in inner-city high schools.
One example is the Bryan High School Urban Ag Academy in Omaha, which is in its fourth year of operation. There are more than 120 students in the ag academy program and the school’s FFA chapter has 98 members, making it the largest FFA chapter in Nebraska.
Sophomores Jermiah Ramos and CheMarquis Pinkney are both in their first year of the program.
“I thought the agriculture program would show a lot of unique opportunities. At first, I thought it was mostly on learning how to farm, but actually there’s a lot of other things like marketing and business,” Ramos says.
“I was always kind of into forestry and I thought it was something I could learn more about—as well as learning more about agriculture and what it stands for,” Pinkney says.
AUDIO: Ramos and Pinkney
Ag education instructor Channing Reha says they have two main goals with the program.
“Letting our kids know where their food comes from, and then hopefully seeing them work in the ag industry, whether that’s in the urban setting or coming to a rural community and helping out the agriculture industry,” Reha says.
School counselor Randy Schultz says they want students to know that there are good opportunities to work in agriculture.
“If they want to be a vet, they can go be a vet, whether they grew up in the city or not. If they want to be an agronomist, or they want to work a grain elevator, or they want to have their own farm—maybe it’s a specialty crop or something that’s a niche opportunity—that there is that possibility out there,” Schultz says.
AUDIO: Reha and Schultz
Brownfield visited with the students and their instructors during their recent visit to the Ficke Cattle Company farm near Pleasant Dale, Nebraska.
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