RICHLAND COUNTY, Ohio— Kristen Eisenhauer grew up on a Richland County farm in north-central Ohio, raising beef cattle, Boer goats, and honeybees. Active in 4-H and FFA throughout high school, she attended The Ohio State University intending to become a high school agricultural teacher.  

Following her freshman year of college, Eisenhauer changed her mind about who she wanted to teach. A study abroad trip to Honduras sparked a desire to work with students who hadn’t yet developed a baseline passion for the industry.  

“I decided when I was student teaching that these kids already know agriculture — they already have that passion for it,” she said. “I wanted to work and be able to be with kids that haven’t developed that passion yet, to be able to explain agriculture to them and hopefully give them opportunities that I had as a child.”  

Eisenhauer began looking for internships and found an opportunity with The Ohio State University Extension in northeast Ohio.  

“I did an internship the summer after my sophomore year up in Mahoning County, which is an area where the kids don’t know where their food comes from,” she said. “We did a lot of urban gardening, we did gardening in schools, we taught kids about agriculture.”  

After graduating from OSU in 2019, Eisenhauer took a full-time position with the Mahoning County Extension office. She spent over six years there before returning to her roots in Richland County to help local youth discover agricultural opportunities.  

“It was an opportunity for me to come home and help an area close and near and dear to my heart also explore agriculture,” she said.

Although she’s coming to an area of the state with a robust agricultural base, she still sees a massive opportunity to reach her target audience.  

“We have a strong 4-H program and a strong FFA program here, but there are still kids in this county that can benefit from the opportunities of what agriculture has to offer,” Eisenhauer said.  

That opportunity to reach them came at a recent workforce development event organized by the Richland Area Chamber of Commerce. The annual event, which alternates every year between local middle school boys and girls, drew a crowd of more than 1,150 seventh- and eighth-grade boys.  

Kristen’s invitation to speak came from Angie Cirone of the Richland County Chamber of Commerce. While giving a tour, Kristen spoke briefly about county 4-H initiatives, prompting Cirone to reach out and invite her to present. Chamber organizers wanted her to share her journey into extension education and utilize an interactive bingo game to highlight non-traditional industry roles.  

The program featured assemblies alongside rotating, 30-minute interactive sessions with local professionals for groups of 15 students. Eisenhauer led three sessions during the day, reaching about 50 students.

Eisenhauer wanted to clear up a common misconception middle schoolers hold. “Their immediate reaction is often, ‘I don’t want to be a farmer,’” she said. “I wanted kids to realize that agriculture was more than just farming.”

Because these students are in the seventh and eighth grades, they might think they already have their entire future mapped out, but those interests frequently evolve. Eisenhauer ‘s goal was to expose them to alternative pathways they might not have considered.  

“If a student is already leaning toward a communications route but also possesses a passion for animals, a field like agricultural communications could bridge those two interests perfectly,” she said. Success for Eisenhauer means ensuring students leave knowing there is always another valuable option available to them in the industry.  

While tools exist to help youth pinpoint these trajectories — such as the online Ohio FFA Ag Careers Test — fitting them into a fast-paced environment is a challenge. Because Eisenhauer only had 20 minutes per student rotation, running a full evaluation wasn’t feasible.  

Instead, she broke her sessions down using a descriptive bingo game. Rather than calling out job titles, she read descriptions of modern agricultural roles to demonstrate the industry’s scope.

“I had some easy things on there like an ag journalist or an ag engineer, and a lot of the kids said, ‘Engineers work on roads and stuff; you don’t need them for agriculture,’” she said. “Then we would go into all the different things agriculture engineers know about the industry.”  

Students were also surprised by how modern operations utilize technology. “They didn’t know that ag was using drones to help with field health, pesticide sprayings, and making our crops healthier,” Eisenhauer said. “It’s fun to talk to them about things that they relate to now and things that they’re interested in, and seeing how that shows up in the agriculture industry.”  

Eisenhauer ‘s long-term vision for Richland County is based on her successful initiatives in her previous role. She plans to implement hands-on activities, partnering directly with teachers to map agricultural lessons to existing academic standards.  

“Something I did in Mahoning County was called ‘Extension in the Classroom,’ where we take agricultural lessons and 4-H projects and turn them into hands-on activities,” she explained. “I would love to replicate that here by working directly with the schools.”  

Replicating that includes programs like “Chick Quest,” where the Extension office lends out incubators so students can watch eggs hatch while studying biological life cycles.

“It directly helps meet the third-grade academic standards,” Eisenhauer noted. “We want to work with the teachers to integrate agriculture into their classrooms without adding to their burden, because we’re meeting their existing benchmarks through hands-on lessons.”

Richland County consists of nine school districts. Eisenhauer’s strategy involves starting small to build community trust without overextending resources.

“I’ll offer limited projects that we would go in and do; that way we can be very efficient with what we’re teaching, and it’s not a ton of time for me to prepare, because there is only one of me,” she said.  

The long-term goal is to use early, measurable classroom success to secure grants and county commissioner funding, mirroring how she successfully expanded her team in Mahoning County.  

“It’s a long-haul goal — it’s not something that’s going to be quick and easy and ready to go — it’s something that we’re going to work towards,” she said. “We’re going to build trust with the community that we have a valuable lesson that’s going to teach kids something valuable for them as well, and then really showing the improvements, the progress, and the impact that we’re making with these kids.”  

Eisenhauer intends to maintain her relationship with the Chamber by attending meetings and deepening the partnership. “Extension is a community organization, and we need those community partners to help us sometimes, and so we need to be willing to give back to them as well and just making sure that we’re there supporting each other and doing what we can for each other,” she said.  

Feedback from OSU-Mansfield and members of the Chamber who were in the building was overwhelmingly positive. “They said that a lot of the kids came out of my session talking really highly about it,” Eisenhauer said. “A lot of the teachers got connected with me so I could go in and help support their classrooms or give them resources. So it was very well received.”  

“Overall I think the event was great,” she added. “Even if kids aren’t going to go into agriculture, it’s great that we’re starting to talk about careers and their future at a young age so that we can really start preparing them—whether that future is college, going into the workforce, or some technical training. It’s important that they’re getting to see all aspects of that as well.”