Any notions of Heber Valley’s agricultural industry being on its last legs are quickly shattered with a tour of Wasatch High School’s 1-acre farm. Two adolescent goats curiously poke their heads through fences in a secluded barn. Greenery sprouts everywhere, both outdoors and in the greenhou se: mint and rose hips, watermelon beginnings and plump cherry tomatoes that students pluck for a sneaky snack while they work. The labor is constant. Even in the July heat, a handful of students kneel on the ground, weeding the landscape instead of taking refuge in the air-conditioned indoors. Tending to the farm is the students’ summer job, and they’re compensated well for it — $13 an hour, matched by $13 an hour set aside in a scholarship fund. Agriculture teacher Matthew Zierenberg launched the farm, Ideal Farms, five years ago as a way to give his students hands-on experience and summer employees with a gateway to university. “A lot of kids that come and work are not your typical … generational-wealth kids,” he said. “When we hire kids, we look for the kids (for whom) there’s a real need.” Two goats live on the Wasatch High School farm, Ideal Farms. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record The employees’ salaries and scholarships are funded entirely from revenue generated by Ideal Farms, which sells its wares to local vendors, including the Utah Department of Natural Resources.  The farm has generated about $400,000 in its five years of operation, according to Zierenberg. Anything that does not pay for student employees rolls back into the farm’s continued operation.  Zierenberg’s local advocacy for agriculture has not gone unnoticed. This month, the National Future Farmers of America Organization named Zierenberg a national teacher ambassador for the upcoming school year. While most states have multiple ambassadors — as many as six, in Texas’ case — Zierenberg is the sole ambassador in Utah.  Zierenberg will provide training and resources to fellow agriculture teachers, assisting them in establishing work-based learning programs and tweaking national curricula to be relevant to Utah’s unique agricultural industry. “Agriculture’s not just corn and animals. Agriculture is all the timber and the rangeland and the ranching that we do here, wildland firefighting, keeping our forests healthy, prescribed burns and all that kind of stuff,” he said.  Zierenberg will also continue as an advocate for agricultural education in Utah. “We see a lot of pressure from our Legislature right now. They’re looking to cut certain programs, and the summer ag is always right there on that (chopping block),” he said. “Luckily, we’ve kept it, but we want to make that a lot stronger and show this is hugely beneficial to our students as they go on to their future careers. But it’s also helping them to give back and build an economy right here in our state, right now.” Recent graduate Trey Torres worked in the summer agriculture program all four of his years at Wasatch High School. The money he has earned will help fund his entomology studies, as soon as he can pin down which university to attend. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record Zadie Mitchell, left, and Trey Torres, right, are summer employees at Wasatch High School’s Ideal Farms. If Torres’ passion for insects was not apparent by his T-shirt reading, “Easily Distracted By Ants,” it shines through in his voice as he talks about the ant colonies he keeps in his room.  “The first thing I remember, I ate a roly poly. That was I think where it started,” he said, half joking.  In taking various agriculture classes and working on the farm in the summer, Torres has earned valuable skills — time management, teamwork and leadership — that will stay with him as he pursues his creepy-crawly career. Seventeen-year-old Zadie Mitchell said something similar about her experience growing tomatoes. “We had tomatoes at the beginning, but they really weren’t good, so we had to start over and plant different kinds and learn how to problem solve,” she said. “I think that’s a really useful skill in the future because you’re always going to run into problems.” For Zierenberg, the appeal of teaching agriculture is instilling grit and critical thinking in students.  He has been a teacher for 17 years, entirely at Wasatch High School. He’s currently one of five agriculture teachers in the Wasatch County School District. He began by teaching biology, physics and chemistry, later teaching an agricultural biology class. Within a few years, he’d transitioned completely to the agriculture program.  Zierenberg found the constant hands-on learning a welcome change from the sparse, controlled labs in other science classes. Running a farm is also an excellent way to keep students off their phones, both because they’re engaged and their hands are too dirty to touch their screens. “Meeting the kids with something that’s real is the key, and that’s what agriculture does,” he said. “They feed the goats. They’re like, ‘Oh, I have to keep this thing alive. This is real. I actually have to do this. If not, the thing dies.’ You don’t get more real than that.” Growing plants and raising animals are also excellent Trojan horses for Zierenberg to sneak science concepts into his students’ minds. “(In growing apples,) we talk about the roots, the shoots, the gibberellins, all the stuff that goes into raising a tree and raising healthy plants,” he said. “We bring all that science into it. But they see it as, ‘I’m learning to make apple sauce!’” Wasatch High School teacher Matthew Zierenberg shows off plump cherry tomatoes students have grown. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record The high school’s agriculture program also teaches students about sustainability.  Zierenberg’s students in the agricultural track of the high school’s Center for Advanced Professional Studies are installing solar panels on the farm to fuel its entire electrical output. The walls of the goats’ barn are lined with recycled Plexiglass instead of plywood. And the greenhouse uses a closed-loop aquaponic system. The students look after goldfish and koi, whose waste becomes fertilizer for plants. In return, the plants clean the water pumped back into the fish’s tank. “It’s basically an ecosystem just running right here. We take the benefit of fish waste and put it into growing lettuce and tomatoes,” Zierenberg said. Students learn how to take care of the environment through the projects they participate in through the agriculture program.  They’ve sold thousands of willows to the Division of Wildlife Resources to plant along rivers to regenerate stream banks eroded by overgrazing or wildfires. They’ve raised thousands of chukar partridges for Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife to sustainably hunt.  Not all of Ideal Farms’ projects make a profit. Students are currently growing trees to replace native plants destroyed by construction at the new Deer Creek High School. They also donate lettuce and tomatoes to local food banks every year.  While agriculture has certainly shrunk in the Heber Valley, Zierenberg is consistently surprised by the popularity of the high school’s program.  “Some of them, they come from legacy farm families here in the valley. So their grandparents owned a dairy. I mean, we had 40 dairies in this valley at one time,” he said. “Their parents skipped a generation, and we just see this resurgence … that interest in learning about where their families come from.” The waitlist for Wasatch High School’s agriculture program is constant, Zierenberg said. The program will expand to accommodate more students when Deer Creek High School opens next month. Zierenberg said it’s hands-on learning that draws in most students, even those with nothing more than a passing interest in agriculture. He said he hopes that even his students who do not go into the industry remember the National Future Farmers of America Organization’s motto as they cultivate their futures: “Learning to do, doing to learn, earning to live and living to serve.” The post Wasatch High School teacher stands out as Utah’s lone ambassador of agricultural education appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less