Down on the Farm With Urban Aggies : In the shadow of L.A., students and teachers bring the country to the city.
Paul Hise goes to Gardena High School every day, even during summer vacation.
Sixteen-year-old Hise has mouths to feed--71 of them--and eggs to collect.
Hise, who has 71 laying hens at school, is one of a few dozen local agriculture students and teachers who work on campus farms day in and day out, including summers, Sundays and holidays.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, 25 high schools and 23 junior highs have agriculture programs, many of them with gardens, greenhouses, chicken coops, even pigpens. These campus mini-farms flourish, often unnoticed by passers-by, in the shadow of Los Angeles’ freeways, apartment buildings and shopping malls.
Hise’s red-feathered hens have put him on a year-round school calendar. “They never stop laying,” he said. Hise sells the eggs to Gardena High School staff and others for $1 a dozen ($1.25 for extra large).
In fact, while school is out most places, summer is high season for the campus farms. The corn at Grant High School in Van Nuys towers over the goats and sheep that browse among the stalks. To ensure the survival of campus livestock and to keep weeds from overwhelming campus rose gardens, the school district hires a dozen agriculture teachers and a dozen students to be summer gardeners. Their numbers are augmented by a cadre of volunteers who work for love, not wages.
Gardena agriculture teacher Heidi Vietor, 29, also goes to school almost every day.
Vietor isn’t being paid to teach this summer, nor is she one of the salaried “seasonal field gardeners,” as the district calls them. But Vietor said she feels obligated to make sure Gardena’s 6-acre mini-farm--the district’s largest--is running smoothly.
“Even if I just had plants, I’d have to be here,” Vietor said. But she has animals to oversee as well, including Sir Lancelot, a boar that weighs more than 400 pounds. Each season creates a different set of responsibilities for the campus farmers: The chores of summer include hosing dried mud off the boar so it won’t overheat.
Vietor’s regulars--the handful of her 30 students who are serious about agriculture--include Jennifer Stanley, 14. Stanley, who is raising six turkeys at Gardena, wants to move to Wisconsin and work on a dairy farm owned by her family when she finishes school. Her unglamorous summer tasks include dusting the birds with a pesticide to kill lice and trimming their nails. “One of the males cut up one of the females pretty badly when he was breeding her,” Stanley explained.
Vietor said she thinks the most important lesson agriculture students learn is responsibility. Most of the livestock on local campuses is owned, and eventually sold, by the students. They quickly learn that agriculture, like parenting, is a full-time job fraught with consequences. Farmers have to plan ahead. When Vietor takes her regulars camping this summer, she has arranged for her husband to hose down the boar and gather the non-stop eggs.
Earthquake-Proof Pigpens
In the San Fernando Valley, a field of alfalfa ripens in the sun across the street from busy Topanga Plaza. The alfalfa, growing on the grounds of Canoga Park High School, will be used to feed the flock of black-faced sheep that live on the suburban campus. Canoga Park has only 1 1/2 acres devoted to agriculture, but its facilities include a small milking barn and an air-conditioned rabbit hutch. There are also pigpens, made of steel-reinforced concrete to ensure they are earthquake-proof.
Steve Pietrolungo, 33, recently named one of the state’s 12 top agriculture teachers by the California Agriculture Teachers Assn., heads the Canoga Park program. He planted alfalfa because the commercial stuff is a pricey $12 a bale, and maximizing profits is one of the lessons agriculture students learn. Other campus plots are devoted to field corn (also for the sheep), grapes, sweet corn and tomatoes.
Pietrolungo is one of the district’s summer gardeners, helping maintain the livestock and plants at 10 Valley schools (the presence of staff on the campuses probably discourages vandalism as well, district officials say).
Pietrolungo regularly checks on his school facilities even when he is not being paid. That is the way ag teachers are, he said.
Future Farmers
During the school year, about 120 students enroll in Pietrolungo’s courses, everybody, the teacher said, “from the kids who are going to go to Davis to the kids who are lucky to graduate from high school.” (The University of California, Davis, is a leader in agricultural higher education, as are the Cal Poly campuses at Pomona and San Luis Obispo.) Pietrolungo became interested in agriculture when he was a student at Canoga Park.
The school’s program actually peaked in July, Pietrolungo said. His students, like most of their cohort in other schools, are active in Future Farmers of America (FFA). For them, the apogee of the year was the recent San Fernando Valley Fair, where competing students showed and sold lambs and other livestock and flowers.
Pietrolungo’s students grossed more than $30,000 at the July fair, most of it from auctioning off the plants and animals they had raised. Big winners included 16-year-old Dan Wahl, who got $6 a pound for the prize-winning rabbits (destined for the table) he nurtured on campus.
During the school year, Canoga Park aggies do everything from making and selling corsages for school dances to milking the resident cow to feed the veal calves. They learn how to propagate plants and how to neuter livestock. During the summer, they continue to supply local nurseries with baby’s breath, begonias and other garden stock grown on campus. For some students, school in summer is better than the beach. “To me, this is like a second home,” said 16-year-old Debbie Proulx.
Lessons in Business
Like his colleagues on other campuses, Pietrolungo is quick to point out that his charges do a lot more than “shoveling manure.” As FFA members, they must keep careful accounts of how much they invest in their animals and how much they make after the stock is sold and butchered. Most students who want to raise big-ticket animals--say, a $1,200 steer--have to negotiate bank loans. They use a classroom computer to keep track of national agricultural information, including current market prices for livestock, flowers and produce.
The work is sufficiently demanding that agriculture teachers argue that more of their courses should earn students science credit.
Ag students, their teachers say, become skillful at real-life problem-solving. They learn, for example, that noon is a better time than dawn to gather eggs. As Pietrolungo explained, most eggs are laid in the morning. “If you collect first thing in the morning, you’re collecting yesterday’s eggs.”
Pietrolungo also encourages his students’ professionalism by refusing to name school livestock, however winning. As student Donna Halliday, 16, explained, the campus “ram is named Joey, but Mr. P. calls him 8711. That’s his ear tag number.” Mr. P. is unrepentant. “When you make it a pet and name an animal, it’s that much harder when it’s time to butcher.”
‘Very Therapeutic’
Some of the district’s summer gardeners start work before the sun is up. Twenty-seven-year-old Roger Neal, who teaches agriculture at Carson High School, is on his summer job by 7 a.m. While he said he loves working with students, he also likes being alone on the campus farms he weeds and waters. “Being a teacher, you need to collect yourself,” he said. “This is very therapeutic.
One of Neal’s favorite spots is the tranquil Japanese garden on the campus of Peary Junior High in Gardena. Neal skims the three ponds in the garden as if they were swimming pools. He also checks on the 40 carp or koi that live in the ponds.
Neal said he likes agriculture for philosophical reasons as well as pragmatic ones. He prefers perennials to annuals, and he especially likes fruit trees. In his view, fruit trees are productive, beautiful and “laid back. Once you get them established, they are there for you,” he observed.
In Neal’s view, a school farm in summer is a magical place to be. There are two huge ash trees on his plot at Carson High. “I’ll finish my work, and I’ll just lie down in the grass,” he said. “The birds know when the students aren’t there, and they just come on in.”
