by MEREDITH BAUER-MITCHELL, UF/IFAS
When Benjamin Wolking was raising goats in his high school Florida 4-H program in Micanopy, Florida, he never imagined the hands-on experience would lead him toward a career in biomedical engineering.
But the problem-solving skills he learned through the UF/IFAS-led youth development program — the largest of its kind in the nation — were transformative. And Wolking is not alone.
Numerous alumni credit the 4-H program with helping them develop the fundamental problem-solving skills and perseverance that made their tech- and STEM-focused college degrees possible. Upwards of 230,000 members in the state of Florida make up the 4-H community of more than 6.5 million young people across America.
“4-H is where I first realized how much I enjoy problem solving,” said Wolking, who is now a junior physics and biology double major at Bates College, set to study biomedical engineering at Columbia University in the fall.
Finding solutions on the farm
Wolking learned firsthand how to tackle complex problems just by working in agriculture. While handling small herds in his hometown, for example, he regularly struggled to keep his goats from escaping their pens and jumping fences.
“My dad and I couldn’t figure out what was going on,” he said. “We checked the fence and reinforced it, but we couldn’t find a problem.”
Resorting to watching the herds overnight, Wolking saw a rogue goat hurdle the fence. The next day, Wolking began designing modifications to solve the issue and secure the enclosure. Tackling this technical challenge reinforced Wolking’s interest in STEM, and he went on to complete an internship involving research on in-vitro cardiac tissue.
“A lot of what Florida 4-H does is it gives you an opportunity to see what you like, and to become curious about different scientific topics and develop that curiosity,” Wolking said. “Even topics like raising an animal or beekeeping, they all have strong ties in STEM.”
Educating the next generation
Katie Howard, a UF geomatics junior, participated in Florida 4-H for 11 years in her hometown of Arcadia, Florida, and said she gained a love for teaching and presenting science topics while in the program.
“4-H focuses on taking a topic or project that a youth is interested in and teaching them adult responsibilities and preparing them for adult life,” Howard said. “[The program] takes what they love and teaches them how to do it in their careers.”
Now Howard spends her time as an intern for the UF/IFAS School of Forest, Fisheries and Geomatics Sciences, creating education kits to teach surveying and mapping through the Geomatics Education Library.
“In surveying, we barely meet the replacement rate of surveyors who are retiring, so we need to recruit more youth to this profession,” she said.
The education kits teach the processes, critical thinking and technology required to do surveying, mapping and geospatial analysis. Any Florida 4-H Extension agent can request the kits for their students while in the pilot phase.
Building future businesses
Travis Lommerse, an agricultural business senior at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, said the skills he learned in Florida 4-H will ultimately help him expand his family’s plant nursery business in Sanford, Florida.
“It has allowed younger kids to see the technology early on, and it shows them that the tech they used in Florida 4-H is used all the way up to the college level and in the industry, where the applications are endless,” he said.
Lommerse said Florida 4-H taught him about the fundamentals of growing plants and meticulous record keeping — skills he has used in his accounting and financial classes and that come in handy when understanding how to handle business inventory.
As the president of his college’s Agricultural Engineering Technology Club and via his classes, Lommerse and his peers work with advanced on-board automation systems on tractors and precision agriculture systems for weed spraying and planting — and advances like self-driving machines are on the horizon.
“Florida 4-H has allowed multiple generations of students to understand different facets of their future industries,” Lommerse said. “And a lot of it goes back to the baseline of teaching people the basics but doing it in a way that’s fun and interesting.”
Provided by UF/IFAS