Farming in the 'burbs not just for farmers anymore

Fill out your brackets. It's May Madness! The teams are ready for the 2010 Yield Challenge, and here are a few tips:

If your team is using a 30-foot-wide header, eight swathes of 363 feet long each will harvest 2 acres; don't forget to correct soybeans to 13 percent moisture before converting to bushels per acre; and remember that even though every team will plant in a loose, well-drained loam and keep their cyst nematode count down, the field (pun intended) is wide open right now.

Granted, this year's Yield Challenge (find out more by going to the Illinois Soybean Association website www.soyyieldchallenge.com) doesn't garner the attention given the high school basketball tournament. But it is just one of the ways officials promote agriculture education in our state - even in the suburbs.

Kaneland High School in Maple Park doubled in size as the suburbs pushed west, but it still hosted a "Drive Your Tractor to School" day this spring.

"Do I think of it as a rural school now? No, not at all," says Elmer Gramley, who played on the school's 1962 conference champion football team when he was a farm kid, and now is a farmer on the school board. "It's changed dramatically."

So has agricultural. Gone are the days when most people in Illinois actually lived on a farm and worked in the fields. But agriculture is still the largest employer in our state with 25 percent of people working in the field, says Luke Allen, program adviser for agricultural education through the state board of education.

"They're not trying to teach people to be farmers," Allen says, noting agricultural education takes in everything from learning how to landscape a golf course to designing the robotic arm that screws the caps on bottles of salad dressing. "I have a lot of schools in the suburbs looking at starting horticulture and agriculture programs."

Kaneland might be the only suburban school with $200,000 tractors in the parking lot, but agriculture has roots in schools in Naperville, Geneva, St. Charles and other suburbs where a kid might be a short drive from a soybean field.

"I'd love to get some more coverage in that area. That corner of the state is real interesting to me," says Jim Nelson, who went to Judson College in Elgin in the late 1960s and now heads up the soybean yield contest. "When I left the college and headed to the west, I could get into farm land in a mile or two."

Strip malls may have been the fastest growing suburban crops in the 1980s, but Kane County actually saw an increase in the number of farms in a 2007 census, says Steve Arnold, manager of the Kane County Farm Bureau.

"That's partly because we have people who are taking an interest in how and where their food is produced," Arnold says. "I think we're actually reaching a point where more nonfarm people are beginning to see the opportunities available in the whole food and fiber sector. As an industry there are lots of jobs in the sector beyond production."

Only 10 percent of students in agriculture studies come from farms, Allen says. Even most of those farm kids won't go back to farms. They'll become scientists working on plant genetics and food processing, landscapers and florists, engineers and chemists, bankers and computer programmers.

"It's amazing to me as a school board member to see the interest of nonfarm kids. It's refreshing," Gramley says. "It takes a lot of dollars and a lot of education to be part of agriculture today."

While FFA used to stand for Future Farmers of America, today's FFA just signifies a world of opportunity.

"Not many kids are going to grow up to play basketball," Allen notes. "At some schools the FFA is more important than the basketball program."

The deadline to register for this year's Yield Challenge is May 15. One of these days, a suburban team might win the crown.