Being an ‘aggie’ was ‘in,’ but it’s now ‘in between’ : Young Farmers Persist as Open Land Vanishes

Seventeen-year-old Rikki Norwood gets some strange looks when she occasionally walks JJ, Kayleigh and her other animals along the residential streets that lead to her El Toro home.

After all, goats are not the standard household animal in the south county bedroom community.

Rikki--who keeps her goats at Mission Viejo High School’s farm year round, except for a few holidays--is a Future Farmer of America. She plans to own a herd of goats one day, as well as pigs and calves. It’s hardly a chic ambition; while others her age are roaming the shopping malls, Rikki spends her free time feeding and caring for her goats.

“Being an aggie means you don’t wear your white dress to school on the day you clean out your pen,” she said one day recently at the Orange County Fair, where she is showing six goats.

“But I love it,” the Mission Viejo High School senior said, as Kayleigh, a year-old Nubian goat, climbed up the side of its pen and nuzzled her affectionately, like a puppy.

It Used to Be Rural

There was a time--and not too many decades ago--when being an “aggie” was the norm in Orange County, when herds of farm animals and the fruit orchards that gave the county its name filled the flatlands and rolling hills.

But those lands now produce more condominiums and tract homes than oranges and cattle, and keeping an interest in agriculture alive among the youngsters can be a challenge. While membership in 4-H clubs--which promote cooking, crafts, computers and home values, as well as agricultural activities--remains strong, Future Farmers of America chapters are sometimes struggling.

“We’re having a hard time,” conceded Jim Bailey, livestock supervisor of the fair and an agriculture teacher at Sunny Hills High School. High schools with agricultural programs have a difficult time, because FFA focuses on livestock raising and crop growing--activities that involve one of Orange County’s most valuable commodities, land.

“We’re just not rural here anymore,” said Bailey, who is coordinator of agricultural education for the Fullerton Joint Union High School District, where he has been teaching for 29 years. “You have to work at it. There’s just not space.”

Schools Provide Teachers

In Orange County, there are 10 FFA chapters organized at high schools, Bailey said. The schools provide teachers, agricultural science classes and farmland for the animals and plants. There had been an 11th FFA chapter, at Brea High School, but it was phased out recently, Bailey and a school official said. (By contrast, 4-H Clubs are for youngsters ages 9-19, and although coordinated through the University of California Extension Service, they are run by parent volunteers, similar to scouting programs.)

Sunny Hills’ program hit hard times two years ago, dropping to about 85 students, but next year it should be back up to about 150, Bailey said. However, several other schools in the county, such as Mission Viejo and Sonora, are reporting their numbers down.

Orange County’s rural disappearing act aside, agriculture today “is not getting good press,” Bailey said.

With the news of overproduction, farm foreclosures and low cattle prices, parents are reluctant to encourage their children to pursue an interest in a field where the economics are so uncertain, he said.

So how can teachers get students interested in agriculture, especially in an area where the words “Irvine Ranch” and “farmers” now conjure up the image of a yuppie market?

“The person involved has to be excited. We have to show the students the many aspects of agriculture available to them,” said Bailey, who grew up on a farm outside Kansas City.

“All of us have to eat. And someone’s got to produce that food, package it, sell it.”

FFA member Mike Kavanagh, 16, of Yorba Linda plans to be a marine biologist, but that does not dim his enthusiasm for raising land-bound animals, such as Stanley, a 1 1/2-year-old black-faced Suffolk ram he is showing at the Orange County Fair.

“It’s important to show people the importance of farming,” Kavanagh said as he teased Stanley’s ivory wool with a blow dryer.

Orange County may have lost its rural atmosphere, but people cannot allow that to happen to all of America’s farmlands, he said: “If we build over all of the farmlands, we’ll have to buy all of our food from other countries. (Keeping agricultural programs in suburban area high schools) gives people an idea of what farming is all about.”

Kavanagh, who will be a senior at Placentia High School next year, owns Stanley with four other FFA members. The 250-pound ram is kept at the high school’s 1 1/2-acre farm, where the owners must show up twice a day--no weekends or holidays off--to feed him.

Living in tract homes and in cities that have zoning codes that prohibit keeping agricultural animals in residential areas, today’s FFA members don’t have the luxury of taking care of their animals in their own yards, said one of Stanley’s other owners, Jeremy Jones, 17, of Anaheim.

“Absolutely not,” said Jones, an aspiring veterinarian who owns seven sheep, two goats, two pigs and a steer. “I don’t think the law would let us.”

Being an FFA member is not particularly “in” on campus, either, he said: “We get teased, ‘Oh, here come the farmers,’ But it’s no big deal. All the football players get ragged on, too.”

Rikki Norwood said being an “aggie,” was “in” a few years ago, but is now “in between.”

“It depends on whether any popular kids are in it. It’s an activity, like any other activity at school, like being a cheerleader,” she said. “But in order to get into it, you really have to ignore what other people say about you.”

What got Norwood into FFA two years ago was poor grades in Spanish: “Agriculture was the only class still open at the time, so I took it. And I loved it.”

For her first year, she raised a market swine and a goat, Melody, who died while having a kid. Losing the goat was very difficult, she said, because goats are extremely affectionate and it is easy to grow attached to them.

The heartaches aren’t all made by nature. Such holidays as Halloween and the Fourth of July can be especially dangerous times, when students and other pranksters have been known to steal, mutilate, injure or kill animals, she said.

“They (vandals) think it’s like painting on a wall,” Norwood said.

So for a few holidays every year, her goats become backyard pets. Is that allowed in El Toro? “Legally, no. Technically, barely,” she said.

But soon the Norwoods will move to Riverside, just so Rikki can raise her goats and begin building her herd in her own yard.

“She said when she was 4 years old that she wanted to be a farmer,” said her mother, Cathy Norwood. “And we thought that was hilarious.”

Across the fairgrounds, away from the barnyard sounds and smells, is a building that also reflects youth interest in Orange County’s agricultural roots. The 4-H Building houses displays of home-grown fruits and vegetables, cooking, canning, arts and crafts, woodworking, sewing, cake decorating, veterinary science. There are even some more contemporary projects displayed, such as rocket models and photography.

This is 4-H’s 70th year in Orange County. Although it is not the stereotypical farm club anymore, the program is going strong, said Michael Mann, 4-H program coordinator for the county.

He said about 1,000 youngsters belong to 17 community clubs. In addition, 4-H runs three other programs that involve nutrition education and special-interest projects, such as the raising of guide-dog puppies.

Actually, as the county has become more urban and upwardly mobile, there has been a resurgence of interest in 4-H, Mann said.

“People see it as a traditional-value family program, and people are feeling a need to get back to that,” he said.

Young parents are attracted to the clubs because, he said, “They can see their children are really learning instead of sitting in front of a TV. It’s something the family can do together.”

The trouble, in increasingly urban Orange County, is not in attracting the youngsters but in pursuading enough adults to lead the groups, Mann said, adding that two-career households have cut into the spare time parents have for volunteering their efforts.

Even when the clubs are involved in traditional 4-H activities, such as baking and canning, stereotypes are fading. A few years ago, a boy’s cooking project was started, and boys began winning the top prizes at the county fair for their cakes, breads, pies and cookies, Mann said. At the same time, girls dominated the woodworking projects.

Darik Hardy, 13, a member of the Villa Park Eager Beavers, this year baked a cake, cut it into the shape of a sports car and carefully covered it in blue and silver icing to enter in the cake-decorating competition at the fair, and won a first prize for his efforts.

He isn’t embarrassed to have a project in a category traditionally entered by girls, he said. “Whenever I walk by a bakery, I usually see men working there,” he noted matter of factly.

This year, the biggest 4-H category at the fair is arts and crafts. Fruit and vegetable entries are down--about 50 total--which could be a reflection of the dry year, a 4-H volunteer said.

The projects often vary, based on the location of the club, he said. The 4-H’ers in rural Orange Park Acres obviously will keep more animals than their counterparts in Fountain Valley, Mann said.

But there is a 96-acre 4-H farm near the UCI campus for 4-H’ers who want to keep animals but are unable to do so at their home, he said. It is used mainly by 4-H’ers in Irvine, Newport Beach and Lake Forest, Mann said.

Bailey, the FFA adviser at Sunny Hills High School, admitted that having a student take care of an animal on a school farm, then go back to his suburban tract home, is not the same as growing up in a farm atmosphere.

“But that’s getting them closer to it than if they had never done it,” he said.

What’s more, Bailey said, agriculture teaches students about reality, perhaps in a way that purely academic pursuits do not.

“I think these kids can survive better,” Bailey said. The students learn how to doctor sick animals, gather eggs and sell them, watch animals give birth, “and they see animals lay down and die.

“These kids know that things don’t always go right,” Bailey said. “They learn success and failure.”