An FFA vision for the kids

What does the future hold for the FFA school agriculture property south of the high school as the group is settling into their new opportunities and responsibilities? Teacher and advisor Hugh Jenkins talks about the challenges and plans.

Jenkins had planned to build a barn on the south field east of the high school parking lot, but the logistics of the street for which the school district is pushing is not going to allow for the structure in the immediate area. This issue has not, though, dampened Jenkins’ enthusiasm: “Until the barn goes in, we’ll make this cool little lean-to facility.”

The Whitcomb FFA Chapter will be working with the University of Wyoming Extension to study different environmental impacts to grazing, rain gain, cover crops, etc. According to Jenkins, Crook County currently has no definitive studies on these subjects.

“So we can show Crook County ranchers that this is what we’re doing and on a micro scale, this is what it costs,” he says.

When this project began, Jenkins expressed his hope to see the young people come together, learning team work, and he says that, with the advent of these extension programs, they are.

“The kids can do the research, collect the data and turn it into a project for Crook County’s benefit,” he says.

“I’ve got kids who have never had to ask help or rub shoulders with other kids, now they’re starting to become [a unit]. It’s really cool to see the maturing.”

He said that the studies will probably take about five years and anticipates “three or four grazing paddocks with different verities of cover crops”.

Jenkins has not given up on the barn, either: “I hope to see, in five years, a really nice building put out there, the research plot designed and built, a hard fence around it and critters grazing on it.”

With all of this in the works, Jenkins also plans to follow the scholarship template shown him by Jeff Garman offering ewes and heifers owned by the local FFA chapter to kids to care for and breed for a set period of time, allowing the youth to keep the money from that effort including calves, lambs, milk and wool, thus the scholarship funding is based on their own work as they learn a valuable skill.

The temporary shelter the class put together last school year is empty now as the last lamb was taken to fair this month, but Jenkins has every intention of seeing his vision of what the kids can accomplish grow when classes begin again in the fall.