FILLMORE : Agriculture Student Wins Scholarship

The agricultural scholarship Jennifer Yeargan won sits in a bank awaiting her decision. Will she spend the $2,000 at California Polytechnic State University or Pierce College? Yeargan, 17, a senior at Fillmore High School, doesn’t know yet.

Yeargan won the scholarship this month from the Ventura County Community Foundation, impressing a panel of judges with her “poise” and “enthusiasm for agriculture,” said Cathy Edge, president of the foundation. The scholarship was endowed by Alfrida Poco Teague in memory of her husband, Milton, who was a farmer.

Although Yeargan is not sure where she’ll go to college, she says she will definitely study agriculture. She might get a teaching credential, she says, to be a role model for students like herself. Or a degree in agricultural law, which would put her in a position, she figures, to help farmers fend off bankruptcy proceedings. She’s keeping her options open.

About 300,000 acres, or 25% of the county’s total 1.2 million acres, was devoted to agricultural uses in 1989, according to the Ventura County Agricultural Commission’s 1989 crop report.

Yeargan, president of the Fillmore chapter of the Future Farmers of America Club, says she has been active in area agriculture “forever.” Since she joined the 4-H in elementary school, she has raised “everything but sheep,” she says.

That includes horses, pigs, dairy cows and veal calves, most of them raised for the county fair competition. In each of the last four years, her livestock have picked up gold medals at the fair.

For this summer’s fair, Yeargan is raising a veal calf, which she hasn’t named yet, but bottle-feeds goat’s milk three times a day. With the milk and bales of grain and hay, she hopes to get its weight up from its current 60 pounds to 350 to 400 pounds.

Yeargan is also planning to show Peggy Sue, a dairy cow she has been tending for a year.

Like most accomplished livestock breeders, Yeargan has a steady, easy manner and a soothing voice. Nothing seems to ruffle her, not a calf that nuzzles her halfway around a corral seeking more milk, or a cow that is reluctant to leave its bale of hay and come out in the sunshine.

“It’s hectic at times around here, though,” she says. In addition to caring for her livestock every day and riding her horse as often as possible, Yeargan attends high school, works part time, serves as vice president of the Ventura County Junior Fair board and goes out of town on several weekends a semester to Future Farmers of America conferences.