Blair Oaks High School is celebrating a successful first year for the school's agriculture program.
This week's FFA banquet recognized several of the 86 members who participated this year, Blair Oaks ag teacher and FFA advisor Jeff Suthoff said. This included the horse-evaluating team that took second at the state competition and the forestry team that finished sixth.
"We set the bar high," Suthoff said. "It was a very good first year."
Before this year, Blair Oaks students had been taking agriculture education programs at Nichols Career Center in Jefferson City.
Suthoff said 20 percent of jobs in the United States are agriculture-based, but only 2 percent are from the production side of the business. Heading into this year, he emphasized they weren't teaching students to become farmers, but instead focused on marketing, research and sales.
"We'd been looking to do an agriculture program for some time but lacked the facilities," Suthoff said. "When our industrial arts instructor retired, that opened things up for us to integrate in the ag program."
A lot of what they did this year focused on the basics of agriculture, he said.
"A lot of what we do is to educate the public about what agriculture does in their lives so they get a better understanding of what's really going on," he said. "The program is not just classwork. We focus on opportunities for leadership, and we still have the hands-on instruction for things such as welding and woodwork."
With registration for next year wrapping up, Suthoff believes the program should have about the same number of students next year. Next year they'll add classes for animal science and construction with the ability to get college credit through Missouri State University in Springfield, he added.
"The community support for the program has been outstanding," Suthoff said. "We don't have as much of an agriculture presence in this area as, say, 35-40 years ago, but we're still a rural area and that helps."