City students taking greater interest in agriculture

CHICAGO -- About the closest Dan Mudd wants to get to a farm when he's finished with school is the rough of a golf course.

Yet Mudd spends his days at the one high school in Chicago where students work a 39-acre farm taking care of chickens, a goat, a pig and even a couple of llamas.

The senior considers himself lucky to have gotten in.

"Last year we had 1,187 applications," said David Gilligan, principal of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, as the school's newest tractor rolled by his office. "We took 150."

It might seem odd that agriculture is so popular in a city where the most noteworthy crop is the ivy at Wrigley Field.

But educators say this school illustrates the growing interest in agriculture among city and suburban students around the country. The interest is growing in large part because students have discovered that an agricultural education doesn't necessarily mean a future on a farm.

"This is not about teaching somebody to be a farmer," Gilligan said, "but all the related opportunities."

That message has helped push membership in the national FFA Organization, formerly Future Farmers of America, to its highest level in 19 years. After falling from more than 509,000 members in the mid-1970s to 382,000 in 1991, the FFA now has more than 461,000 members.

Big urban gains

"The biggest gains we've made are in cities like Chicago, Houston and New York," spokesman Bill Stagg said. "We are really picking up students in urban areas."

In Illinois, the number of high school students taking at least one agriculture class has more than doubled since 1990 to 25,000. The biggest bump has been in urban areas.

There was enough interest last year in Minnesota to open the Agricultural and Food Sciences Academy in suburban Minneapolis -- the state's first such school in an urban area. Already, enrollment has more than tripled to 150.

And in Queens, New York, the number of students studying agriculture at John Bowne High School has nearly doubled to 600 students in the past decade, said Steve Perry, an assistant principal.

Educators and others say city students flock to agricultural schools in part because it's new to them.

"They don't have a commitment to the family farm," said Lucille Shaw, who heads the agriculture department at the Chicago school. "You just have to tell them about the 200 careers in ag science."

Students buy into that. "You will always have a job in agriculture," said Earl Young, an 18-year-old senior at Chicago's agricultural school.

The success of agricultural programs in rural areas has been mixed. As the number of family farms has steadily dropped -- the Department of Agriculture reports the number fell by 200,000 in a decade -- rural students didn't see much point in picking up skills they'd need for jobs that were disappearing.

Years ago, "We had ag classes all day long, you couldn't get into the ag classes," said Karen McCombs, the principal at Virginia High School, in central Illinois. "Now we don't have ag, and the five kids that are interested we send them to the other (nearby) high school."

But some rural high schools have strong agricultural programs. One of those is in Patoka, in south central Illinois. Norma Borgmann, the superintendent of the school district, said the program has thrived precisely because it has shifted its focus away from preparing the students to take over the family farm.

"It would have dried up if we didn't," she said.