By DEBORAH BEHRENDS

Indiana Correspondent

PAOLI, Ind. — At Paoli Junior/Senior High School, students taking agriculture-related classes and those in FFA are the same group.

That group stays busy learning by doing and providing food for lunches through the entire school year. The hands-on learning experiences started three years ago when one of two ag teachers, Cory Scott, wanted to bring a gilt in for the students to raise.

“I wasn’t happy with the ways things were going, so the administration told me, ‘Mr. Scott, if brining a pig in here will keep you happy, go ahead,’” he recalled.

Rather than working out genetic selection on paper, for example, the students bred the sow and farrowed the pigs. The offspring were shown and sold at the fair. Scott said the district told him and the other ag teacher, Kyle Woolston, that they needed to use more technology – so they got a webcam to stream footage of their sow, and some of the students wrote blogs about their experiences.

“Our school has about 1,400 kids, K-12, and the first year, we had about 12,000 views of this pig,” Scott noted.

During the second year, more kids became involved in ag classes because they wanted to be part of something. So what was the next step?

“Someone said, ‘Why don’t we eat (the sow) at school?’” Scott said. So, they had one of their hogs processed, while worrying how the students would respond knowing it was a hog raised at the school.

“But the busiest days (in the cafeteria) were when we were eating our own pork,” he added. “We found out the kids were proud of their work.”

The next step was to look at different ways to expand and do more to feed the school. The answer was in raising hydroponic lettuce. “The first year, we ate maybe two or three days of lettuce. And by the third year, we processed enough pork that we had sausage for breakfast for the whole year and pork barbecue for lunch,” Scott said.

He said prior to having it provided by the ag students, the school purchased five-pound compressed bags of lettuce. “No one knew lettuce was supposed to have flavor,” Scott said, with a chuckle. “We grow butternut varieties in different colors.

“We really learned we were on to something, here.”

To increase production, the students designed a system they call The Ark. It contains four 4-by-8-foot beds stacked on one another. It requires just one pump to pump the water from the bottom back to the top where it flows down bed by bed, keeping it aerated as it moves.

“The exciting part is watching the students working, being innovative, figuring out how to grow food on our campus with limited space and limited resources,” Scott said.

Sophomore Harley Bush, vice president of the chapter this year, started in FFA as an eighth-grade student. “My main part is mixing in the nutrients (for the hydroponic lettuce). I helped plant the seeds, check the temperature,” she explained.

Along with taking ag classes, Bush stays busy as the wrestling team manager and playing softball in the spring. She plans to attend Purdue University with the goal of becoming an ag teacher.

Chapter President Nick Padgett has the same goal, and he appreciates that Bush is more available in the fall to step up for the chapter while he plays football. He bears the bigger load in the spring while she’s playing softball.

He has been more involved with pork production, and said the chapter is planning to undertake a fundraiser to build an ag lab – a better environment for the hogs than a greenhouse.

“We want our greenhouse back,” Scott said. “We want to be able to expand and do more warm-weather crops – strawberries, cucumbers, tomatoes. We need to get the pigs out to expand our food production.”

He said the students have written a proposal and are seeking sponsors even before the official fundraising kickoff sometime in November.

“These kids are always looking to figure out what’s next,” he added.