FFH & 4H June 2021

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A SPECIAL PUBLICATION OF THE TURLOCKJOURNAL.COM

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Hali Bream

TUSD Far m Coordi n

ator

Harve sting fruit for Child Nutri tion lunch es, housi ng anima ls for the Stani slaus Count y Fair, prepa ring soil for schoo l garde ns...t he work of the TUSD Farm conti nues, but we miss the sound of stude nts' laugh ter here. We can't wait to welco me them back soon!

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Fair to return this July with changes

BY ANGELINA MARTIN

The Stanislaus County Fair will return to Turlock this year, albeit with a few differences.

A board meeting decision made in April approved moving forward with a “modified version” of the fair this year after the event was cancelled in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Stanislaus County Fair CEO Matt Cranford said that the plan currently includes four weekends of fair fun in July, excluding the 4th of July weekend and weekdays, which will center around shows and concerts in the fairgrounds arena with the possibility of food and carnival rides.

“Doing a festival or fair like we normally do could be problematic,” Cranford said.

Rather than its typical 10-day run, the Stanislaus County Fair would welcome patrons on July 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 23, 24 and possibly the 30 and 31, Cranford said.

Last year was probably my single hardest year professionally. We work year-round to have a county fair, and to be told you can’t do it makes it tough . . .

Now, we have some light at the end of the tunnel — Stanislaus County Fair CEO Matt Cranford Fair show staples like tractor pulls, monster trucks and the destruction derby will still take place in the arena.

Cranford is also working with Stanislaus County Public Health and the carnival company to bring in a “stripped down” version of the fair rides visitors know and love during the fair’s first two weekends, with capacity levels enforced.

All planning is contingent on current COVID numbers locally, he added, and the organization is prepared for any jump or drop in cases. The fair is classified as an “amusement park” under the state’s tiered reopening guidance and while Gov. Gavin

Newsom has said restrictions will be lifted June 15, it’s uncertain whether or not the fair could be included in the rollback.

“We’re not sure how it will look in July.

It could change and roll backwards, or things could open up more. We just don’t know,” Cranford said. “I’ve taken a very cautious and conservative approach with COVID this year because it seems like it changes every two or three weeks...We don’t want to spend money to put together a festival atmosphere and then not see it materialize.”

While the fair was able to host virtual livestock shows for agriculture and FFA

students last year, this year will see shows return to the fairgrounds in an extended format over the course of 21 days. Fewer people will be allowed to view the shows in order to promote social distancing.

Dairy cattle and goat livestock shows will be held July 7-11; beef cattle and swine July 13-18 and sheep and meat goats July 21-25. Small animal show information can be found at stancofair.com.

Cranford said while the plans are still in motion, it’s nice to be moving forward with one of the county’s biggest events which drew 260,000 to Turlock the last time it was held in 2019. This year’s event is to keep the fair financially stable, he said, so that it can return in full force next year.

“Last year was probably my single hardest year professionally. We work yearround to have a county fair, and to be told you can’t do it makes it tough,” Cranford said. “Now, we have some light at the end of the tunnel.”

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Photo contributed

This year, livestock shows return to the fairgrounds in an extended format over the course of 21 days.

Journal file photo

The Stanislaus County Fair Board is planning on a modified fair run this year, which will include arena events like the destruction derby.

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School farms provide ag opportunities at Turlock, Denair schools we’ve ever received, so obviously I’m very excited about it,” Jacobsen said. “Our main, quantitative goal for next year is to process and distribute 1,000 pounds of food.”

In addition to providing fresh, locallygrown food for students, the school farm also provides both FFA and special education students with work experience. Already, students who signed up for a special summer program are helping to ready the farm for planting, and once the garden is set up, others will have the opportunity to care for the garden and keep the farm functional. Additionally, the grant funding will allow Jacobsen to hire an intern who will be paid $1,500 for their contribution to the farm.

After a year of pandemic restrictions, students are happy to be back on the farm and Jacobsen is eager to help things feel normal again. The Denair FFA chapter was able to keep busy throughout the pandemic, she said, whether it be through hosting their usual fundraisers or competing virtually during conventions.

“There hasn’t been a lot of farm growth

BY ANGELINA MARTIN

Farm experience is a key component for students hoping to one day venture into the agriculture industry, and recent state funding granted to both Turlock and Denair is helping their respective district farms flourish.

While Denair Unified School District’s school farm was already home to Future Farmers of America livestock projects, students will soon have the chance to grow fruits and vegetables on the farm, which in turn will be used in school lunches. Thanks to $20,000 in grant funding from the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s 2021 Farm to School Incubator Program, DUSD students, along with ag teachers Holli Jacobsen and Taylor Doo, are in the process of transforming a oneacre plot of land from weeds and dirt into a full-blown garden.

Later this summer, a variety of food will be grown and used in student lunches.

Wildflowers and other native plants will also be planted in order to attract pollinators.

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because we’ve been developing our individual chapter and establishing traditions,” Jacobsen said. “Now, we’re finally to the point where we can start expanding and organizing more projects.”

Just a few miles away in Turlock, DUSD has a shining example of what their school farm can become in just a few short years.

The Turlock Unified School District farm on Taylor Road is alive with student FFA projects from swine to cattle, orchards teeming with juicy fruit and planter boxes filled with a variety of growing vegetables.

While the TUSD farm only recently achieved its goal of providing food for school lunches and the Pitman High

see what was possible and now we’re making it happen.”

The TUSD farm benefits from interns as well — two from Pitman and two from Turlock High School — who help clean up after animals, plant crops, provide general farm maintenance and, most recently, have helped Bream deliver dirt to elementary school campuses in order to revive their school gardens. The hope is to create a revolving agricultural door within the district, which sees students become interested as youth, learn skills in their teens and eventually graduate with the knowledge they need to enter the ag field.

The system seems to be working, as

School culinary arts program, students and Coordinator of Environmental Studies and Applied Horticulture Hali Bream can now do even more thanks to funding they received from the state’s Farm to School program as well.

The funding will allow TUSD’s Child Nutrition Department to purchase produce from the school farm to be used in school lunches, Bream said, like the fresh apricots she and students recently picked to be delivered and used in summer school lunches.

“It’s nice to see the rewards of the effort we’ve put in, especially during the COVID year,” Bream said. “We took a step back to

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more students than ever are interested in agriculture classes. Pitman is preparing to hire a fourth ag teacher, Bream sad, and Turlock’s FFA chapter continues to thrive at 800 members strong.

“That’s what the FFA program is all about: students learning how to work in ag and having the experience to be able to accomplish those goals so they know what they want to do within the field of ag,” Bream said. “Whether it’s animal science, horticulture, landscaping or irrigation, they’ll have a lot of different opportunities to see different parts of ag work, and it will help them hopefully get their focus on what they want to do.”

Westside Ministries asks for community’s

BY ANGELINA MARTIN

Westside Ministries in Turlock is asking for the community’s help — and votes — in their effort to win a tractor for the organization’s Food Literacy Program.

Selected from some 400 applicants, Westside Ministries is one of five contest finalists in Kubota Tractor Corporation’s Hometown Proud Grant Program. The local nonprofit is the only finalist from the West Coast in the online competition and would win $100,000 in grant funding if they receive the most votes. As of Friday afternoon, Westside Ministries was tied for third place with 1,360 votes.

According to Westside Ministries founder and director JoLynn DiGrazia, the grant money would be used to purchase a new tractor for the charity, make improvements to the organization’s kitchen — both of which would benefit the Westside Ministries Food Literacy Program, which teaches children the ins and outs of agriculture while providing food

boxes to the underserved.

“We’re trying as hard as we can to get everybody to vote for us every day because it would make such a huge difference in the neighborhood and what we could do with food production,” DiGrazia said.

Westside Ministries has needed a new tractor for years, she said, and was in the process of figuring out how to finance a new one from Garton Tractor, Inc. in Turlock when the business told them about the Kubota grant program. A new tractor would help expand the nonprofit’s onsite garden to allow for more planting of winter crops at their property on West Greenway Avenue, where students also keep their hog projects for the Stanislaus County fair.

The tractor would also help Westside Ministries continue its use of restorative soil practices, which help conserve water and do away with pesticides.

Grant funding would contribute to a kitchen restoration as well, giving students a place to prep the food they grow

and utilize the produce in the Food Literacy program’s food boxes. In addition to handing out more than 150 USDA food boxes each week during the pandemic, Westside Ministries utilizes its own youthproduced food along with produce from local food banks and grocery stores to distribute their own food boxes to 500 families each quarter.

During the pandemic, vegetables grown by the children were sold at inexpensive prices to seniors and others in need and the effort is set to continue this year.

“We use the food the kids grow and then it goes into our kitchen,” DiGrazia said.

“They learned to hustle and do whatever they could last summer to market and sell those vegetables, and they did really well.”

In addition to learning how to care for crops, the Food Literacy program teaches participants work ethic, technical skills and emotional healing, better preparing them for life in Turlock’s ag-heavy community and beyond. For DiGrazia, seeing the support from the community so far

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has made her truly “hometown proud.”

“We would love to have our hometown of Turlock be proud of us and to be recognized for this wonderful honor,” DiGrazia said. “This city is really the gold of the Valley and the center of farming. To show that the underserved have the same access to farming and good food would just make Turlock look even better than it did before.”

DiGrazia encouraged Turlock residents to try and vote once a day for Westside Ministries, and said she’s been telling supporters to set an alarm on their phone to remind them to vote.

“We figured out if everybody makes a decision to vote every day, it will make a huge difference for this community,” she said.

To vote for Westside Ministries in the Kubota Tractor Corporation’s Hometown Proud Grant Program, visit https:// www.kubotausa.com/hometown-proudvote and click on the Westside Food Literacy Program badge.

vote in grant contest

Photo contributed

A new tractor would allow Westside Ministries to expand upon its Food Literacy Program, which gives underserved youth agriculture experience while providing fresh food to those in need.

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Ceres Ag Center provides hands-on learning environment for elementary students

BY DALE BUTLER

P.E. teacher Dean Dewing wanted to pass on his love for horticulture to students at Hidahl Elementary so he decided to create a school garden.

With assistance from longtime Central Valley High School agriculture teacher Ken Moncrief, Dewing’s idea became a reality this past school year.

“Initially, I called Ken to see if he could help us start a little one on campus,” Dewing said. “He opened the high-school garden. He gave us the keys to the kingdom so to speak. We had everything we needed to start gardening.”

The high-school garden is located at the Ceres Ag Center, which sits on 6.5 acres of land behind the elementary school.

“It was the perfect time for them to be able to use the farm,” Moncrief said. “All of the high school kids weren’t able to do anything out there because of COVID. They did all of our seed planting and greenhouse work until the school district opened for secondary (7-12) students. It was so exciting to see the kids pick stuff they’d take home in bags. It was a lot of fun.”

“It’s been a great experience for the

students,” Dewing said. “We got a lot of support from Ken and our principal (Mrs. Adams). I’m going to do everything in my power to keep the garden going. It’s highly beneficial for the kids. They get to see the whole process from seed to table.”

More than 75 Hidahl students in grades 4-6 spent parts of their instructional days at the Ceres Ag Center during the 2020-21 school year.

“It was a bright spot during COVID,” Dewing said. “The kids were excited to be outside doing something new. The whole experience was uplifting. Many of the students are interested in gardening now.

We’re going to continue it next year.”

When Ceres Unified elementary schools reopened for full-time in-person learning in April, Hidahl students gardened between 8:20 a.m. and 10:50 a.m. on Wednesdays.

They utilized the farm on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, from 12:30-2 p.m., during distance learning.

Moncrief provided everything students needed to farm, including seeds, garden boxes and tools.

They planted lettuce, kale, spinach, fennel and snow pea seeds.

They harvested lettuce, kale and spinach.

“Kids don’t learn by sitting and hearing about it,” Moncrief said. “They need to do it. Hands-on experience is vital.”

“We split up assignments,” Dewing said.

“Some students would plant. Some students would weed. Some students would transplant plants into pots in the greenhouse. They got to see how the whole process worked. The students were little sponges. They absorbed a lot about gardening. That was my goal.”

Spearheaded by Moncrief, Ceres Unified broke ground on the Ceres Ag Center construction project in 2009-10.

The district provided 6.5 acres of land, which had a value of $100,000 at the time of donation, for the farm and assistance in financing for a tractor that cost $25,000.

Moncrief installed shingles on the 3,000-square foot instructional/processing/storage building.

“After five years, the state provided opportunities for grants,” Moncrief said.

Expansion included adding a swine barn, a large livestock building and a greenhouse.

The farm has fruit trees, table grapes,

berry patches and row crops.

“We’ve spent close to $2 million in state grants to build livestock facilities and upgrade our plant facilities,” Moncrief said.

“For a lot of our students, this is their first experience with farming or livestock,” said Beth Jimenez, communications specialist for Ceres Unified. “It really exposes them to possible career pathways that they might not otherwise have encountered.”

Future Farmers of America (FFA) members from Central Valley and Ceres High raise livestock for the Stanislaus County Fair at the Ceres Ag Center.

Students are also in charge of planting, tending and harvesting row crops, fruits and vegetables for Ceres Unified’s Child Nutrition Department.

The district purchased $23,000 worth of produce from the Ceres Ag Center this past year.

“The key to our success is the relationship we have with the school district,” Moncrief said. “They primarily buy our grapes, peaches, plums and pluots. They serve it for lunch.”

“That’s our funding source for our dayto-day cost,” he added.

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