ASHLAND, Maine — High school science teacher Janet Perry integrates agriculture into all of her classes at the Ashland District School and also is helping grow a robust local chapter of Future Farmers of America.
Students in the FFA Ashland chapter recently won more than 20 awards at the Maine State FFA Convention May 17 and 18, in competitions ranging from agricultural sales to floriculture and landscape management.
“It’s not always about the winning,” Perry said. “We love to compete but we really enjoy spreading the word about agriculture and all the opportunities in northern Maine.”
Perry has been teaching life sciences and chemistry in Ashland since 1991 and helped revive Ashland’s FFA chapter in 1998.
“It’s been a big hit ever since,” Perry said, adding that about 25 percent of Ashland high school students are members of the group. “We’re small enough so that kids hear about others in the group.”
Many of the Ashland FFA students do not come from traditional farm families, but the group helps expose them to job opportunities and diverse areas of interest that nurture their passions and career goals, Perry said.
“We have a lot of kids who have really never set foot on a farm,” he said. Some of the students do part-time and summer work such as picking rocks, haying or landscaping. They’ll also use FFA to pursue their own learning projects, such as volunteering with food pantries, interning with sled dog racers or raising rabbits for fleece.
“You can do FFA with as little as one animal or a garden. It really all is agriculture,” Perry said.
At the Maine State FFA Convention last month, the Ashland team earned first place in competitions for agricultural sales, natural resource management and floriculture, while individual students earned high marks in a range of areas.
“The contest we’re most proud of is floriculture,” Perry said, crediting junior Mackenzie Hall with inspiring the whole team to prepare well for plant identification tests. “This year she wanted to win floriculture and this is against schools downstate that have full horticulture programs.”
Preparing for that competition also involved job shadowing Cook Florist in Presque Isle.
The Ashland FFA team will now be competing in floriculture, as well as other areas, at the Eastern States Exhibition in Massachusetts this summer and at the national FFA convention in Indianapolis, Perry said.
The students will be doing fundraising for the travel costs associated with those trips, Perry said. She added that the Ashland FFA chapter receives support from the Maine Agriculture in the Classroom Foundation, the Maine Potato Board and Irving Forest Products.
In the process of fundraising, students learn about managing finances for an organization. They even helped cut down on the travel and lodging costs for the Maine convention by leaving at 5 a.m. on the first day of the event, rather than booking a hotel room the night before, Perry added.
“Trips are important in that it takes us outside the classroom. We connect in ways that we can’t here. On the way down and back, we stop and do different agriculture activities.”
