[folksy guitar music]
- Main Street in Medford looks like many rural communities,
home to the Taylor County Courthouse,
and is surrounded by farm country.
- Medford is fairly rural.
- So, maybe it's not surprising
when you walk into Lisa Kopp's high school class
that you find this.
[cheep, cheep]
- If you have a chick right now,
can you perch it on your finger?
You can see how
they have the desirable instinct to just want to perch.
- I did not grow up on a farm.
Ever since I was little,
I had a really big passion for animals.
Chicks are flock animals, right?
- It's a passion Lisa passes on to her students
and most of them didn't grow up on a farm either.
- Now, out of a class of 25 to 30,
only about two to three kids are still on that production farm.
So youth, even in this rural community,
are almost two generations removed from that farm.
- Putting these kids back on the farm
is just steps away from their traditional classroom.
- Right, hey you guys, let's go to the barn.
- It's a really fun thing to be able to come to school
and know that, hey, you're going to the barn today.
[country music]
- This is the Medford High School barn.
- They're expected to be over here when class starts
and they get back to the building
when their next class starts.
- Student: We have chickens,
a calf,
pig,
sheep,
rabbit,
and one cat.
They're very comfortable with us.
Hi.
- There you go.
Loosen it and get it around her two ears.
- Lisa saw the problem...
- If we expect farmers to continue
in this next generation,
we need to teach them.
Good job.
- ...and the solution.
- Good girl.
- We need to show them
what tasks literally need to be done to be that farmer.
This is our bull calf we have here at school.
It's more engaging for students to learn,
if you actually have the animal.
And this barn is engaging.
[sniff, sniff]
[oomph of effort]
You can put some more feed into here.
Good job, girls.
[ripping sound]
[whoosh of feed into bin]
They have to collect eggs every day.
Chickens, they lay eggs about every two days.
And we need to go collect those.
We sell those at school.
They get a grade for doing chores.
It's part of their class expectations
that they wear rubber boots,
and they get in there and use a pitchfork.
They feed 'em. They water 'em.
They move 'em around. They lead 'em.
Walk him down the road.
Stretch his legs a little bit.
- It's a lesson most of these students won't get at home
or anywhere else.
- This project is extremely unique.
There are not a lot of schools that have a farm.
So, the farm itself, is run by high schoolers.
It's owned by the district.
- As the number of Wisconsin farms continues to dwindle,
Lisa sees this hands-on classroom
becoming all the more important.
- Get used to that being on her head.
Yup, so put her on her feet.
- We consume vegetables.
We consume meat.
Do you know where your meat's coming from?
We need to show the students that, hey,
some of these tasks: raising sheep,
raising pork, raising beef cattle,
you can do on a small scale at home.
So this is Marvin.
He's a red and white Holstein.
And he is growing really well.
There are so many life lessons
that can be learned on a farm setting.
And I'm trying to replicate that farm setting here,
in this school farm.
- If one barn is good, two barns must be better.
- We're building a new barn
where my classroom will be next year.
So, we're going to have to
already expand the barn that we just finished building
because of the student numbers going up,
and the demand for another ag teacher.
And can you see what we were talking about?
The lamb is kind of getting it.
Learns to not fight it, relaxing a bit more.
- Lisa sees it as securing the future for farming
and the community that rallied around her dream.
- Oh my gosh.
The Medford community has been so helpful.
And they do see the need for this education
because a lot of the youth are not on the farm.
They're not thinking of these career paths in their future.
- I actually donated six pigs to this project
'cause I feel strongly about it.
I'm really happy that she made it happen.
She's such a huge role model.
- It's for our next generation.
And if we don't show them how to do these things,
they're not going to do it.