Focus is an acronym for Food Chain under Survey and was developed to provide an in-depth look at the food production and their pricing influences. Our audience is a small group of well qualified high school juniors that are very interested in agriculture business and production. 

During this series of classes, we will expose the young adults to how different businesses are structured, how pricing is affected by inputs and how we get food from farm to table in all population densities.  We provided experiences for the youth on the production side at all levels of farm size and market influence. We visited with a farmer that produces fresh produce on about 3 acres and sells directly to the public as well as a farmer that produces more than 15,000 acres of crops and has 30 employees. Middle-sized producers were visited as well and the students got to ask questions of all farm hosts and learned much about the structure of and needs of each location. 

We also visited our value-added producers in the county as well:  Flowers Foods (large bakery), Boones Butcher Shop (full-service butcher shop), Blend-Pak (blender of flour, herbs, and spices), Willetts Distillery (bourbon producer), and Robey's Country Gardens (fresh produce distributor). During these visits, the participants were shown how farm products were transformed from the raw product into an edible product. 

Finally, we visited a major metropolitan area to show how many people depend on fresh foods and to see how food is being served into these urban areas.  On the way to Chicago, we visited a major dairy that milks 34,000 cows three times a day and learned about the logistics that have to be worked out to get the milk to market and to care for the cattle. While in Chicago we visited an aquaponics operation on the west side of Chicago.  Here they produced tilapia and salad greens in a closed system on a 34,000 square foot urban lot and shared the lot with two other urban farmers.  We also visited a Circular Economy experiment in the Back of the Yards portion of Chicago.  Here we learned how the 20 individual companies (under one roof) depend on one another to create products that end up on dinner tables in Chicago homes.