Fort Meade Students Learn, Serve, and Give Back
by REBEKAH PIERCE
photos provided by ASHLEY WHEELER
A hands-on project in raising chickens has taught Fort Meade FFA students about more than just basic agricultural principles. It’s shown them the power of community, the value of sustainable food, and the impact of giving back.
Ashley Wheeler is an agriculture education teacher at Fort Meade High School, teaching Ag Foundations as well as Animal Science and Agrowtechnology. She recently led an initiative that brought together more than 160 middle and high school agriculture students, one that had a resounding impact on the larger Polk County community.
“Secretly, I want to be this kind of ‘pioneer housewife’ who does their own meat birds and canning,” Wheeler laughs. “So I thought it would be a cool opportunity to explore this with the kids.”
According to Wheeler, in Polk County alone there are roughly 92,000 families dealing with food insecurity.
“They don’t know where their next meal comes from, and a lot of them are right in our backyard.”
After a conversation with the school’s career and technical director, Wheeler asked herself, “How can we give back to our community, but at the same time, teach our students where our food comes from?”
The two came up with the idea of raising meat birds, which they thought would produce a high yield of food in a short period of time.
“If you think about a chicken, typically one chicken will serve six to eight people. If you make things like chicken soup, chicken and dumplings, chicken and rice…because it can go further, you’re taking it off the bone and shredding it, a family of four [receiving] a chicken can now get six to eight meals,” she explains.
And not just any meat, but quality meat.
“I have enough protein for six to eight meals, from the food bank, that I know where it came from. I can reach out to Fort Meade and say, ‘How was this chicken fed? Was it handled humanely?’ They know where their food was coming from, and supplementing it with dry goods from the food bank, [it provides] six to eight sustaining meals to last a family a week.”
Wheeler and her students raised a total of 25 Cornish Cross chickens, finishing the project with 20 birds. Despite the breed’s well-publicized high mortality rate that’s often as high as 30%, Wheeler’s class only lost five — a testament to the quality of care they provided.
“Because it was such a high success rate, we are going to continue the project [in the future] and do at least two rounds per year so we can feed more families in the community,” Wheeler says.
Hands-On Experience
Wheeler’s students were responsible for rearing the birds from start to finish.
“My foundations and agrow-tech classes were responsible for building the coops and the brooders. They were in charge of housing and ‘manufacturing,’ and Animal Science was in charge of making sure there was water, things like sanitation were taken care of, and emptying and removing poop trays,” she explains. The students were tasked with everything, right down to checking on daily health and making the hard decisions about culling.
The only aspect students weren’t involved in, Wheeler says, was processing. This chore was handled by Stellar Game Birds out of Ruskin. After processing, the chickens were donated to the United Way Food Bank of Central Florida.
“On the academic side,” Wheeler says, “[students] learned about feed rations and what protein to feed the birds. They learned about life cycles…about pros and cons, what did we lose, what were some things we can mitigate to make a 100% turnaround [the next time]?”
Giving Back
But she says the lessons stretched beyond simply learning about the chickens.
“The students were able to serve their community,” she says.
“They were able to reach beyond the classroom, see the FFA [motto] of learning to do and living to serve.”
Wheeler hopes to bring some of these lessons into future chicken projects, experimenting with what percentage of protein is ideal in feed to help the birds grow fastest and produce a larger carcass. This, of course, will help produce larger yields for families in need.
Aside from the academic lessons, students learned a lot about where their food comes from.
“Some of my foundations kids have never been in an ag class [before],” Wheeler says.
“They had to separate that bond of pet animal versus food animal. When we think about where our food comes from as a consumer, we don’t always think that the cow we see on the side of the road is eventually going to turn into the hamburger we eat on taco nights. Our kids fully understood the difference between animal ‘pet’ and animal ‘raising for food,’ that both can be treated in humane ways, but our protein source comes from animals. That was the biggest lesson they learned.”
Wheeler is looking forward to future iterations of the project, knowing that even though it’s small scale, it has a huge impact.
“We’re able to bless and help our community,” she says. “You’re helping not only someone that needs food, but [potentially] also your neighbor, that student in class with you who has a pantry pass, who’s a little embarrassed going, but if they don’t go, they may not have food for the weekend. Being able to be that one positive, to say, you know what, I helped my classmate.”