Despite Hard Times, Many Farmers’ Children See Harvests on Horizons : ‘They’re More Into Technology, More Into Management’

They sat in an empty classroom at the Tulare high school farm talking embryo transplants, fertilizers and feed the way other kids talk football, cars and rock stars. They’d all seen a friend or neighbor lose their farm, they said, and all knew their parents were worried.

As for them, however, “Heck, I’m not trying to get patriotic or anything,” said Kevin Gomes, a June graduate of Tulare Western High School who had just been named the Future Farmers of America’s 1985 Star State Farmer for California, “but farmers have seen bad times before. Like the Depression. And everything always gets better. Now we’re more efficient. We have things like embryo transplants and computers. . . .”

“Yeah, there’s always going to be a need for computers,” interrupted Tony Coito, vice president of Tulare Western’s FFA, “just as there will always be a need for food. Listen, I’ve been around dairies all my life. I enjoy it. There’s no other job I’d rather do.”

Brad Gostanian, 18, knew he was coming on like the town rebel and he rather liked it. All the little kids--fourth-, fifth-, sixth-graders, just getting started in 4-H--looking at him, so innocent. And his buddies from Strathmore and Lindsay High School, kids he’d known from 4-H for years, they were shaking their heads, grins on their faces: You got to hand it to Brad to say what he thinks.

“My plans when I get out of high school? I’ll tell you, anything but agriculture. Agriculture’s not for the little farmer.”

Irene Santos, 15, nodded. She understood what Brad was saying and she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life on a farm either. “I’m going into ag public relations or maybe become a lobbyist for ag issues,” she said.

“I like the business (agriculture). I’ve always been a rancher’s daughter so it’s not that I don’t know how to work a bit. But,” she sighed and glanced at Brad’s brother, Russell, 15, “I see Russell and, I mean, he really believes he’s going to be feeding the world.”

Farmers. For years they’ve been viewed as sun-scorched men and women who have always worn overalls and voted conservative. If they made money, it was thanks to government subsidies and minimally paid field hands. If they lost money, they were prime-time tragic drama. (Just last year, there were three feature films: “Places in the Heart,” “Country” and “The River.”)

Now, here are their children. Thanks to mass media, they’re educationally and culturally more sophisticated than their parents. Thanks to the nature of the agricultural life style, which invariably requires participation by the entire family, they know the realities of farming.

Even in California--where agriculture is the state’s largest industry and the San Joaquin Valley the largest and most fertile agricultural-producing area in the world--youths raised in Fresno, Tulare, Kings and Kern counties have no delusions. It’s simply fact that the past five years have been the worst of times for farmers and there’s no immediate solution in sight.

Hardly an inducement to considering a career in agriculture.

Yet in interviews with youths involved in school or extra-curricular agriculture-based programs around Tulare County, 160 miles northwest of Los Angeles, most said they saw their future in farming or some other agriculture-related field.

However, all added, they expected their lives would be much different from those of their parents.

It was mid-afternoon at the 90-acre school farm shared by Tulare Union and Tulare Western High School. The air was hot and dusty, the musty, milky odor of dairy cattle mixed with the flinty smell of the acetylene gas used in the machine shop, the grunts of cows and hogs chorusing the buzz of electric drills and welders.

Tulare tends to be dairy country, so its schools’ ag department is heavy with courses in animal science and ag mechanics. Go to neighboring Visalia where cotton is grown next to citrus and a dairy might be on the other side, and its school district’s vocational agriculture classes are more general--as much geared toward crop production as animal husbandry. But, reflecting changing times and needs, ornamental horticulture and landscaping are drawing more students every semester.

Max Corbett, a dairy science teacher, is Tulare Western High’s FFA adviser. He and Tulare Union’s FFA advisers, Frank Marinelli and Dave Caetano, had pulled in some of their best and brightest to talk about the future. All leaders in the Future Farmers of America, their conversation was sprinkled with references to such FFA activities as its leadership program, fund raising and competitive judging teams. (“Farm driving, horses, citrus--name it, and they’ve got a judging for it,” explained Tulare Western’s FFA president Frank Nunes, who went to Scotland this summer as part of a dairy cow judging team.)

They’d given it some thought, how they were different from their parents. As far as values go, their conversation indicated, those are the same: a love for the land, a belief in the work ethic and the value of family.

And their families--Kevin Gomes was typical. “Our parents always tried to make things better for us. That’s one reason why me, my brother, my cousins--we all see ourselves staying in the business.”

But if they hope to make it these days, “efficiency is now the name of the game,” Corbett said. “You have to grow more cotton per acre, get more milk per cow. You can’t go out and buy land like you used to.”

“Technology has gotten so advanced that really the emphasis is now on management,” said Nunes.

“But even if you’re spending your day on a tractor,” Tony Coito, 18, added, “compare the 1960s tractors to the ones you buy today with the air conditioning and laser equipment.”

Everyone in the room had attended one of the many week-long seminars in artificial insemination offered around the state. And all were figuring on college.

“Our parents,” said Anthony Freitas, 18, who’d just come in from his ag mechanics class where he’d been building a sub-surface ripper from old parts, “talk about how they never graduated. But it’s not like they’re ignorant. I mean they know what’s going on.”

Exposure to New Ideas

“But these kids,” Corbett continued, “will have the exposure to a lot of new ideas that their parents might never have. . . . When these guys’ dads were in school, they’d hardly heard of artificial insemination. And feeding cows, that’s become especially important. When I grew up, cows were all fed alike. Now they’re grouped according to how much milk they give and fed accordingly.

“That’s where these guys can make a difference. They’re more into technology, more into efficiency. They’re more into management. They’re going to make it. They’re not going to have to go out and physically milk cows. Instead, to survive, they have to run the whole operation.”

The students nodded. This was what they’d been preparing themselves for. After all, as Frank Nunes said, “there are just no assurances now.” And that’s another reason why they’re all going to attend college, he added. “If we go out of business like the others, we’ll have something (a college degree) we can fall back on.”

“What we’re seeing are different expectations,” said Lark Carter, dean of the school of agriculture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “This has been a sobering experience for all of us. Our students are aware that they must be much more careful than, say, their parents about leveraging and financing, that they have to be more careful in their management decisions if they are to avoid getting caught in this position again.”

Enrollment at Cal Poly’s school of agriculture is capped at 3,700 and, Carter said, has been full since April. “There’s been no reduction in our enrollment even with what’s happening to agriculture. In fact, more are applying.”

Carter and officials at other schools with strong agriculture departments said their curriculum has been modified over the past few years to put more emphasis on agricultural management, accounting, business management.

“Of our enrollment, if a fourth go back to the farm, that’s on the high side,” Carter said. “These days only a small portion are actually going into production farming. We prepare people who service the farmers. We’re more oriented toward marketing, sales, financing.”

The way the 4-H youths were talking, they weren’t even sure their families would still have their farms by the time they got around to taking them over.

“They’re asking me, do you want us to stay around, to hold on?” said Jennifer Guthrie, 14, of Porterville.

“If they are going to hold on, they want to prepare you for running it.”

Preparation? The kids laughed. Two hours or so of chores a night, plus whatever else needs to be done on weekends. Most of them are their family’s only year-round hands. Even youngsters like Jennifer Brinkley, 9, and her brother, Jason, 12, or Laurie Johnson, 12, who’d stayed late at Sunnyside Elementary in Strathmore to join the older 4-H’ers for a group discussion about what kind of a future they could expect in agriculture.

Besides their farm chores, said Patty Oxford, 18, a Porterville City College student who’s hoping to attend UC Davis and become a veterinarian, there’s 4-H, which is open to youths 9 to 19, and FFA, which simply requires taking a vocational agriculture course in high school. Those programs are specifically designed to expose youths to the technical and managerial aspects of farming.

“Well, no matter what happens at home now, you need college. You’ve got to be a businessman as well as a farmer to be successful these days,” observed Maria Santos, 18, a recent graduate of Tulare Union High School.

That didn’t seem to be what her brother Tony, 14, wanted to hear. His sisters tease him that whatever else he’s doing, he’d always rather be farming, doing something on the land. “I get a good feeling when I’m growing things,” he said, almost shyly. “I guess I’d like to be like my dad. I’d like to pick up where he leaves off. I mean it doesn’t seem fair. You get worried. Farmers are the backbone of the country. What’s going to happen?”

What’s going to happen, say vocational agriculture educators and program administrators from 4-H and FFA, is this generation will have to change its expectations.

Changes already are evident just in terms of numbers:

--FFA’s national membership today is 434,000, a considerable drop from 510,000 in its peak year of 1976.

--California’s 4-H membership was 164,000 in 1976; today, said Hezekiah Singleton, director of the state program, membership totals about 76,000.

--Enrollment in vocational agriculture classes in California high schools has decreased by 7% for each of the last three years, according to Warren Reed, acting state superintendent for vocational education.

FFA and 4-H officials are reluctant to link decreasing membership with the depressed status of farming. Instead, they talk about the declining number of school-age children, the increasing number of alternative activities available, the cutbacks in school budgets for vocational programs and for 4-H, the difficulty in finding adult volunteers to run the various programs.

Increasing Requirements

In the high schools, said Reed, “the increasing requirements for graduation and stiffer state college standards has had an effect on all elective programs that aren’t a part of academic courses.”

This worries people like Mark Linder, agriculture education director for the California Farm Bureau and a member of the advisory committee that recently completed a one-year review of California’s vocational agriculture program. “It’s really tough for a person to meet UC or state college standards and take vocational courses,” he said.

“This bothers us. Kids need the vocational courses both for the exposure to agriculture as a potential career field, but also to give them the hands-on experience they’ll need should they decide to study agriculture in college.”

Not as Concerned

Reed is less concerned. “I don’t object to the demand that students meet basic requirements. . . . A growing number of schools are adding extra periods to their school day so that students can take vocational courses . . . and more and more schools are recommending that vocational agriculture courses be modified so that they can be acceptable for college credit.”

Some observers contend the drop in membership and enrollment is less remarkable than the people who are being lured to agriculture programs and schools.

“Two-thirds of our students are from urban areas,” said Michael Maynard, acting dean of Chico State University’s department of agriculture. “And this may be for the best. These city kids, their scope is broader. The youths who grow up on farms tend to think only in terms of production agriculture. These urban youngsters see other ends (such as engineering, marketing and transportation) where there are jobs.

“Something else we’ve seen,” he said, “is the increase in the number of women studying agriculture. I’d say 50% of our students our women. Some are in farm production, but the majority are studying animal science and ornamental horticulture.”

FFA director of information Cameron Dubes agreed. (FFA began accepting girls in 1969. Its national board includes Nancy Mason, 20, a pre-veterinary medicine major at Mississippi State University. The Tulare chapters also have their share of female members, including Tina Carnes, 18, a former western regional officer, who is entering Cal Poly San Luis Obispo this fall, majoring in veterinary medicine.)

Changing Narrow View

“A lot of people think agriculture and they just see farming. But there’s much more than that. What we’re seeing now are future horticulturalists, agriculturalists, ag mechanics--obviously with all the new technology. But even in the production areas, people tend to have a narrow view of all the options and that’s something we’re (FFA) working on. We want to let people know how agriculture is changing.

“Especially in California, which is so much more sophisticated than other parts of the country as far as agriculture is concerned,” he said.

The distinction between California and the rest of the United States is vital, say observers. “Ag here is so different. It’s almost a mono-culture where I grew up in Iowa,” said Cal Poly’s Lark Carter. “Corn, oats, soybeans and hay, that was it. The growing season was short, but here, you’ve got a longer growing season and so many more species being adapted.

“There are much greater expectations here. There are more opportunities, more species and,” he said with a laugh, “so much more to know.”

Kevin Gomes, California’s top Future Farmer for 1985, was home from school, his bright red Trans-Am (a graduation present he bought for himself) parked in the gravel driveway off to one side of the small house formerly occupied by his grandparents and now used as an office for the family dairy.

Gomes, everybody had said, is the man to talk to about embryo transplants. The burly 18-year-old started his mini-empire as a 9-year-old 4-H member, buying a cow with $1,400 he’d earned working around his dad’s dairy.

By breeding, then occasionally selling an offspring, Gomes acquired 40 top milk producers which are contracted to American Breeding Service. Along the way, he bought and sold two bulls to expand the project. (Of course, he lost a little money too. It was his one venture with a show cow, Gomes said ruefully. The cow cost him $8,000, but shortly after producing two calves, choked on a wire in her feed and died.)

Life on a dairy? Gomes is up at 5 every morning to feed the cows before going to school. After school, “Well, I went out for the golf team last year, but I wasn’t any good.” Evenings--another two hours to feed the cows, both his and his family’s, plus updating via computer all the records on milk and feed and finances and what cow is in what stage of pregnancy.

“But on Friday and Saturday, I go out. Like any city kid,” he said with a laugh, “I’m no different from any other kid, though I am more involved with the dairy than any kid I know.”

Gomes laughed, almost embarrassed at such introspection. In the fall, he’d stick around the dairy and attend College of the Sequoias, then probably Cal Poly. After that, maybe a year or two “going around the nation classifying cows. I think it’s good if I work for someone else. If you’ve only been your own boss, or just worked for your folks, sometimes you don’t respect it. And, of course, if the dairy goes under. . . . I want to grow up, have my own place. All my life, this is what I’ve wanted to do. And if I don’t do this (own a dairy farm), I’ll do something else in ag.”

As far as the Tulare crowd was concerned, now it was their turn. What they wanted the world to know is that they’re tired of people putting down farmers, especially city kids, who act like anyone who lives on a farm is some sort of hick.

“They don’t have the same values. They don’t put in the hours. They just don’t realize,” Coito nodded in agreement. “City kids,” he sneered, “they don’t even put in a two-hour day. They don’t even put on sweat. Just put a meal on the table: They have no idea where it comes from.”

That said, the FFA guys grinned. It was hard to sit inside and talk when there were so many things to do outside. Freitas was nearly finished with his sub-surface ripper which would save his father $7,000 over a new one and which he’d built to his own specifications.

That’s another reason why they liked the idea of going into farming, said Coito. “It’s exciting. It’s something we can do right now instead of waiting until we grow up.”