Over the past few years of working with the youth in our county and being an adviser to the Ag Alumni Association I came to realize the youth of Green County feels there is nothing for them here after High School. 95% of our Junior and Seniors in Agriculture are looking to support there families outside of Green County and a large portion of those students will live somewhere else as well. I realize Green County don’t have everything the larger city’s have but we still have opportunities here and it needs to be made known. I also found during these conversations the students didn’t really understand much about county and state government, banking, Insurance, or just business in general.  

So, I developed this program called Advanced Agribusiness. This course was designed to be a career ready program for Junior and senior’s agriculture students. During this school year these 15 to 20 students would learn about agribusiness through a hands-on experience. 2 days a week we would take them on a business tour and the other 3 days would be in the classroom. These tours would consist of all local government offices, banking, insurance, utilities, farm supply stores, farming operations, and others.

After developing this program, I went to our agriculture teacher Mr. James Bonta and presented it to him and the principle Mr. Ben Davenport. It didn’t take much consideration for them to jump on board and partner with the Green County Extension Office on this program. We had 21 students to sign up and participate in this class the first year. After visiting some of our local government offices, banks, insurance companies, and other businesses the talk was out. The students were interactive, asking questions, and learning. I even had parents to call and thank me for helping with this program. 100% of the students was glad to have had the opportunity to participate in this class. All of them wanted more of there classes to be hands on experiences like this course. Even all our community leaders wished we had started this course years ago.

After a couple of years of this program running through our local Agricultural Classes the High School is now developing one similar for other Junior and Senior students.