American Grown: My Job Depends on Ag | McFFArland, USA

(gentle guitar music) - McFarland kids are tough as nails.

- Okay.

So that's the place.

(drill revving) The school was founded in 1928.

At the high school, we have a little over a thousand students.

Mostly, well-known.

You probably know us from "McFarland, USA."

- Let's go show them how it's done.

(gun firing) (audience cheering) - Most of the families here work in agriculture.

- I do have quite a few friends that do after school programs like sports while also trying to maintain a job in the fields, which is really crazy to think about.

(gentle guitar music) - If this is all what you grow up seeing, then you start to think that there are no opportunities for you.

- We have about 225 students in Ag.

And so that makes up about 1/4 of the overall population.

- We are like it or not for better, for worse.

We are the largest social service agency in the city of McFarland.

- But I like the FFA because we get to go outside.

We get to be in the orchards, we get to meet new people.

I thought planting a tree was simple and no, it's much more than just putting a seed in the ground and waiting for it to grow.

- Here in California with all of the produce, with all of the different, I mean, being the fruit basket of the world you'd think that our families here would have access to fresh fruits and vegetables and things like that.

But the fact is we're in an island here a food desert.

- Our economy locally is based on agriculture.

One of the issues that we see is that students have this idea that agriculture means working out in the fields.

Part of our mission is to kind of change that narrative.

- Imagine if we were to have a BA program, that would be crazy.

So many successful children will be blessed with the opportunity in McFarland High School.

- So by the time students complete McFarland High School, they will have college units done.

And for a student whose family or no one in their family has ever attended or completed college there's something magical about that when they see not just their high school transcript, but a collegiate transcript that convinces them, I can do this.

- I plan to go to college of course, use my AA and I'm gonna try to achieve my goal in getting into some kind of agriculture business, and start my way from the bottom and work my way up, hopefully to become a CEO of my own business one day that sounds like a really cool idea.

(gentle guitar music) - [Narrator] Production funding for American Grown.

My job depends on Ag.

Provided by James G Parker Insurance Associates, insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By GAR Bennett, the Central Valley's growing experts more yield, less water, proven results.

We help growers feed the world.

By Brandit Professional Agriculture, proudly discovering, manufacturing and supplying the Ag inputs that support the heroes who work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California, keeping valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979.

By Pickett Solar, helping farmers and ranchers save money by becoming energy independent.

By Harrison Co, providing family farms with the insights they need to make the best possible strategic MNA and financial decisions.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products, dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families that grow food for a nation.

(bright music) (suspenseful music) - And so here as we drive down these streets, you're gonna see some of the challenges that we have here.

A lot of the streets here have recently gotten sidewalks, but you'll see that they're kind of intermittent as far as when we have it you are gonna see a lot of blight unfortunately especially when it comes to the availability of commercial stores, grocery stores, things like that, very limited opportunities on this side of town there was at one point, several stores here on that serve this side of town that have just disappeared over the years.

(suspenseful music) You know, we're here to serve everyone but this is where the socio-economics are probably the lowest and where we find that so many of our kids are facing the greatest challenges.

- My name is Aaron Resendez, and I'm the district superintendent for the McFarland Unified School District.

McFarland is an amazing community.

It is centrally located.

We're not too far from Bakersfield, but this is a place that is light years, light years ahead of what you would think you'd find in any other school district in this county or virtually any other county in the state of California.

- There's a lot of different things that we can use in addition to just making money it helps you guys understand the value in some of this stuff why making money is a great thing so we learn some of the business side of things but also it's used as to promote what we're doing.

So the school was founded in 1928.

We're part of the Unified District in McFarland at the high school we have a little over a thousand students.

You may have heard of us through "McFarland, USA," the Disney film.

We have some of our counselors and principals and local city council people that are part of the movie and are from McFarland that's how we're mostly well known but we have many other things going on including our Ag department and our FFA Chapter.

We have about 225 students in Ag and so that makes up about 1/4 of the overall population.

The town of McFarland has about 15,000 residents.

Most of the families here work in agriculture.

The student population we have a thousand here.

Most of those students their families are the parents are farm laborers.

(soft music) We have many of the students that are all also work in the fields in a variety of jobs in agriculture that is most of the demographics are set up.

I have students that work out in the fields sometimes after school or on the weekends and in the summer.

So our economy locally is based on agriculture and our students start with that mindset.

One of the issues that we see is that students have this idea that agriculture means working out in the fields.

And so part of our mission is to kind of change that narrative and show them the other opportunities that we have.

We have some of the world's largest farmers right outside of at the city limits here and our students might not see it in that through that lens.

But our job is to kind of show them the opportunities that are available right here.

(soft music) - Hi, my name is Anika Fernandes, I'm in grade 11 and I go to McFarland High School Early College and I was in one of the first Ag departments and for the BC courses that they have at McFarland High School.

And on my free time I like to play sports.

I would like to get somewhere in a business major when I'm in college hopefully, hopefully somewhere in the Ag department, just so I can be local and stay in my hometown hopefully, or who knows, maybe move out that'd be interesting to experiment with.

- McFarland High School is the first early college, level three early college in the state of California.

That wasn't where we wanted to end that was just the beginning for us and so we wanted to take that, what next?

What are some of the opportunities that we can provide our students, this community.

How do you provide a rising tide for the community?

So you can change the trajectory and the success of not just individual students, but an entire community.

And so that was the genesis for what we began to develop in cooperation with our partners at the Current Community College District, Bakersfield College, Bakersfield College is one of very few community colleges in the state of California that has a bachelor's program.

In this case in industrial automation.

We already had a partnership with Bakersfield College.

So how do you leverage that?

And how do you bring that to the students in McFarland?

So we began having those conversations, restructuring what and how we did business.

And we were able to develop this system which as far as I know is the in California probably first in the nation.

So that students can complete the vast majority of these courses while in their McFarland High School classes.

(soft music) (intense guitar music) - So today is gonna be our spring act day.

It's kind of just a way to get all of our little kids kindergartners involved and see what our program has to offer with our state-of-the art facility that we have we're hoping to accomplish and make sure that we can reach as many of our students that are in Clovis unified as possible.

And to make sure that they realize all the great opportunities that they have at our Ag farm, and all the things they can get involved they really can get a touch of every single part of the Ag industry.

- One of the philosophies of Clovis Unified is everything that they're going to do they wanna do it the best that they can.

And so what's unique about that is with our school district in five different high schools and intermediate schools we only have one agriculture program and that's here at Clovis East High School.

With that being said our district is open to students traveling from their main campus here to Clovis East.

However, they don't really get that opportunity till they're a junior or a senior because of transportation.

So we do pull students from all around the district we have students here today that are helping put event on that are from all of the high schools in the district.

We do have a larger percent that come from Clovis High School because it is the closest school to Clovis East, and they do provide transportation back and forth.

But being the only program in the district, we would love to be able to get more of those students involved in here on our campus a little bit sooner maybe when they're freshman sophomore so that they can experience a little bit more of our program.

- Do you guys know where chickens are from like where the chicken nuggets are made from?

What part?

(pig granting) - Walk right down this road Just walk right down that road without stepping on the strawberries, keep walking all the way to the end.

- Clovis FFA has been around since 1932.

It originated at Clovis High School, and then in 2000 we moved out here to the McFarland Clovis Center Clovis East High School.

We have 21 acres and 10 acres of it is production agriculture, where the students are learning how their food is grown whether it's the animals we're raising in the livestock barns to the stone fruit and the vegetables we grow in the orchard and row crop areas.

(bright music) By 2006, our district had purchased an additional 10 acres that we're sitting on right now there was three home sites here, and the homes were moved the infrastructure of leveling the land and putting in the irrigation system was developed and we planted our first orchard in 2006, consisting of about an acre of almonds and 1/4 acre of peaches, plums, nectarine, cherries, and apricots.

And then the following year we planted an additional acre of grapes.

Grapes we have about 1/2 acre of riesling grapes and then another 1/2 acre of table grapes.

- I guess you could say that I was more of a city kid and personally I knew nothing about agriculture until I joined in middle school and then I got to learn more about it, and it was something that really interested me so I continued with it and a good aspect was that not only did I learn a lot from agriculture education, but it also made my parents really proud to know that I'm doing something that they did growing up.

Well, I wanna be a public health major as of right now but I definitely wanna be a agriculture business minor and at some point in life I wanna have a farm of my own and work at it.

So agriculture is definitely something I'm gonna continue doing as a hobby but it's not necessarily something I wanna a career in because it's something I think of more of as a hobby and something I enjoy doing.

So I guess I don't wanna ruin that experience of enjoying it by having a career in it.

But it's definitely something I wanna continue doing.

- Today's generation is very far removed from what happens on a real farm and that's to be expected we've become very efficient at producing food for the masses with a very small amount of people.

And we've done that through innovation and technology, and a lot of those advances we're trying to integrate into our courses because many students are working agriculture today are going to work in an associated industry.

So they're going to sell goods and products to support agriculture, they're gonna do consulting, they're gonna do marketing.

So we're trying to expose them to all of the different career options that are available in agriculture.

So that's really important that they see that, that they know that being an Ag doesn't mean that you're just going to farm or raise livestock.

But it is an option we wanna make sure they're exposed to that as well.

(upbeat music) - In a rural farming community oftentimes our students aren't excited for careers in agriculture because the perspective that they have is Ag labor, and this is Central California, we feed the world.

In fact, Kern County one of the slogans for Kern County, is that we feed, fuel and defend the nation.

And so how do we inspire kids to pursue the jobs that exist and are continuing to grow in Kern County and in the state?

And that is one of the challenges And so for us, one of the missions that we have is not to wait for our students to arrive in ninth grade to get them inspired or excited to get into Ag programs And so what we've done we're fortunate of our Unified School District is we've taken this all the way down into our early elementary.

So we have for first graders, second graders third graders working on gardens, they're coding, they're 3D printing, they're doing amazing science things and we're doing this to show that agriculture isn't just labor.

- The farm bar is basically instead of a farmer having to be like there taking care of it having to plant it or measuring time to plant correctly in each spot it's just the robot growing, planting each plant correctly, each day having a regular system to water it, check the temperature, check how it's growing, check if anything's wrong with it, report back to see everything's correct.

- [Man] There's a little bit more framing material that needs to go up on this front panel.

- Agriculture has always been a part of my life.

So yeah, it was a special thing to do.

It was a special thing to get into and I'm enjoying it a lot.

- I do have quite a few friends that do after school programs like sports while also trying to maintain a job in the fields which is really crazy to think about.

I was fortunate enough not to have to worry about those kind of things, but I have so much respect for my friends that do go out after basketball practice or volleyball practice to go work in the fields with their parents.

- We don't expect every FFA student to go into a career in agriculture, but my goal is to give them the opportunities and the access to make that decision.

So they can have a lot of different options and hopefully some of those skills they develop as a student here can help them in whatever path they want to go through.

(bright music) - In this community, if you don't work, you don't eat.

Distance learning was a significant challenge for our community because our parents did not have, or do not have the luxury of telecommuting of working from home, and so the district again has to move and adjust to the needs of the community.

I mean, we are like it or not for better for worse, we are the largest social service agency in the city of McFarland.

(gentle music) - I'm hoping to have accomplish with these kids is that they understand like that these animals like actually serve a purpose, in our community in our day-to-day life, and they're very important to all of us.

And that they're learning how things are made and where they come from.

(children laughing) - So today here at the Clovis FFA, McFarland Agricultural Center, we're actually having elementary schools from all over the Clovis Unified School District, come on out and just be able to visit some booths that our students and younger generations have put up for these students to look at helping them understand different aspects of agriculture and just even the basics of where your food comes from, how we treat our animals at the farm and how we grow our food and even in the mechanic shop, kids are getting to learn how to fasten using screws and bolts and wrenches.

And it just turns out to be a really good experience for both our high students in the FFA program and the younger kids that we're trying to let know, you know, this is a big part of your life from what you eat to what you wear, to how you get places in a car.

So that's just really important that we're able to let them know about these things from a younger age.

And here at Clovis FFA, we are dedicated to even not just raising up the next of agriculturalists but being able to put out about our program in agriculture and what it's all about, the morals behind it, and how we do things here in the agricultural community.

(gentle music) - I think our future in agriculture is bright and as well as going all the way from production to sales and service, we are a global economy but it's important that we continue to grow our own foods for our own societies.

You know we have the best weather, the best technology and the safest products for our consumers.

- Yeah, sustainable Ag is a huge focus, in Ag education we wanna make sure that we are paying attention to the fact that we have a limited number of resources.

That we are protecting and enhancing the environment by what we do in agriculture.

And that's important because it's important to the people that are buying agricultural product to know that the people that are producing their food are being conscientious of the environment and the limited resources we have.

With increased regulations in our state, it is important that we can do that in an environmentally conscious way so we can keep agriculture business alive in California, because farmers are leaving the area, and we do have a global food supply.

So things are being shipped from everywhere, but we are the leading state in so many commodities and we need to keep that alive because it's scary to think about, if we aren't growing those things then who will be?

Even if they're not going to work in agriculture they are going to be voting at some point in time, and we know how policy has affected agriculture, not always in a positive way, especially in the state of California.

And we need our students to understand the importance of this industry and how to collect information and find valid sources.

So that they can be educated voters, voting on the policy that's going to affect their very own food supply in our state of California.

(soft music) (gentle guitar music) - So we have our students for 180 days, and it is so important for us to maximize every single moment that we have our students because we are fighting against outside forces.

We have all sorts of challenges in this area besides poverty and gangs and things like that, that other parts of the state also are wrestling with, and we need to give our students alternatives, if it's Ag, if it's sports, if it's robotics and music and things like that.

Because we're competing with other activities some that frankly lead to a life of disaster.

And if we don't reach our kids it's our fault because we have them from TK, 4 1/2 year olds to all the way to high school and beyond.

- What are you guys doing today?

- Well, today we are working on the- - Greenhouse - The greenhouse - planner boxes - And yeah, the planner boxes and we're fixing some stuff up where it can come all together and look really cool.

How are you?

- Probably loosen these up a little bit and see if we can get a little bit of flexibility.

When I became a teacher I really saw how amazing this community is, the cultural backgrounds in our students, and they're just like any other student.

They have the same desires in life.

They have these inspirations and things that they wanna achieve in life.

And so I've noticed that working with these students it's opened up some things even in my life that I didn't foresee wanting to get involved with.

And the more I invest in the more I see the students invest in.

And I truly believe we already have some students that are working into their higher educational goals, some have entered the workforce.

(people chanting) It takes a group of people that really care about our student success and it doesn't happen without a lot of love and care for our students.

(gentle guitar music) (intense guitar music) - [Narrator] Production funding for American Grown, my job depends on Ag.

Provided Ag by James G Parker Insurance Associates, insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By GAR Bennett, the Central Valley's growing experts, more yield, less water, proven results.

We help growers feed the world.

By Brandit Professional Agriculture, proudly discovering, manufacturing and supplying the Ag inputs they support the heroes who work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California, keeping Valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979.

By Pickett Solar, helping farmers and ranchers save money by becoming energy independent.

By Harrison Co, providing family farms with the insights they need to make the best possible strategic MNA and financial decisions.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products, dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families that grow food for a nation.

(gentle music)