OAK CREEK — One by one, the woolly, wide-eyed lambs take their turn nestled up in the lap of a stranger, legs dangling in the air, waiting patiently on their backs for what’s to come.
They lay mostly still and fall quiet, sometimes squirming, as students take their turn tending to each lamb, vaccinating and tagging them before shortening their tails and castrating the males.
Like in so many of Jay Whaley’s agriculture lessons, the learning is in the doing rather than in a textbook or on a Chromebook. With both delicacy and speed, Whaley walks his students step by step through the ways farmers care for the young in their flock. Then, he hands over his tools to the teens, coaching them as they attempt to match his precision in each procedure.
It’s a typical way that students studying agriculture at South Routt School District RE-3 spend part of their afternoon class time. They can also breeze through a demonstration breaking down how to artificially inseminate a cow. And they can seamlessly prepare and package many different cuts of meat.
Guiding students through “conception to consumption” is Whaley’s main job in the northwestern Colorado district.
“We teach all aspects of the ag industry,” the longtime agriculture teacher and local rancher said, “what it takes to raise it until it lands up on your plate and you eat it because all of that is the ag industry. It’s not just ranchers and farmers. It’s everything it takes to get it on your plate for you to be a consumer.”
Sitting on a hill overlooking rolling swaths of land designated for ranching and big-game hunting, South Routt School District is throwing all its weight into preparing students for the jobs that power its local economy. The district has beefed up its agriculture program in recent years and was the first district in the state to debut a meat processing program, largely as a remedy for an industry struggling with a dwindling workforce, Whaley said. The rural district’s agriculture program has surged in popularity, just about quadrupling from 23 students in 2010 to more than 80 students.
That kind of momentum is desperately needed in what industry experts like Heidi Crippen, treasurer of the Colorado Association of Meat Processors, call “a dying trade” with skilled meat cutters “very hard to come by.” Most meat packing plant employees must get trained on the job, often beginning by assembling boxes, wrapping meat or packaging it before advancing to grinding and cutting. Others enter the meat processing industry after studying meat science and earning a four-year degree at Colorado State University.
“It’s such a dying breed and it’s such a needed industry,” said Crippen, who also owns Crippen’s Processing in Lake George with her husband, processing beef, pork and wild game. “The meat processors and the slaughterhouses and the ranchers are all who is feeding everybody at the end of the day, and when it’s just a handful of us doing it, it puts a lot of pressure on the local economy.”
Finding ready-to-go meat cutters and grinders — roles that Crippen said demand “extremely physical labor” — has been a persistent challenge, particularly for her business in its remote location and over the past few years with the pandemic racking the industry with a lot of volatility.
Crippen’s Processing has hired three people in recent years who claimed they know how to cut meat, Crippen said, only for each of them to last just one day.
“There’s not a whole lot I’ve found that really know what they’re doing,” she said, “so to have a program in a high school is phenomenal.”
South Routt School District, where about 330 students attended school this past year, grew its agriculture program with funding from a more than $1 million grant through Gov. Jared Polis’ Response, Innovation and Student Equity Fund. That grant initiative gave money to districts in the years following the height of the pandemic to help them support students in overcoming learning setbacks and to better prepare them for future careers.
The grant was split between South Routt School District and its neighbor Hayden School District. In Hayden, district leaders used the funding to develop an agriculture program while South Routt School District leaders expanded their agricultural program to include courses in animal science, plant science, shop, natural resources, food products and business — all of which take a hands-on approach with lab-based instruction, Whaley said.
☀️ READ MORE
Another grant worth $250,000 awarded to the districts through the federal Carl Perkins Career and Technical Education Act Grant padded them with funding to purchase equipment. Outside donations adding up to more than $1 million have helped with capital expenses and transporting kids across the state and country for leadership events and competitions with the National FFA Organization (Future Farmers of America).
“It gives kids a view into an area where they could go on and be either meat producers or butchers or maybe some day chefs or food producers if that’s what they want to do,” Superintendent Kirk Henwood said. “It covers that whole spectrum from pasture to table.”
“If we didn’t have agriculture, we’d be naked and afraid and hungry”
Before students in Whaley’s food products class begin their lessons for the day, they suit up in crisp white frocks, often stained by the end of the period, and black gloves and hairnets. Their classroom is a commercial kitchen, full of stainless steel appliances and tables where they spread out and fall into a rhythm of steady work, darting around one another to speed through their list of tasks. Each student has already earned a ServSafe food handler certification, an industry credential that qualifies them to safely work in a commercial kitchen.
They process an assortment of animals and cuts — hamburger, prime rib roasts, boneless chuck roasts, ham. One student wipes away grease from the inside of a package of meat waiting to be vacuum sealed by his classmate. Another student seasons beef roasts in preparation to smoke them.
The animals make their way to students after being slaughtered by Mountain Meat Packing, a United States Department of Agriculture-inspected processing plant in Craig. Some of the animals come from Whaley’s own ranch, including two hindquarters of beef from a 670-pound carcass that hung in a walk-in freezer for 10 to 12 days waiting for students’ attention and knives. Others come from other local ranchers and some are donated by a family who purchases animals at the Routt County Fair every year. Whaley also buys meat in bulk with a program fund powered in part by profits students make by selling the meat they process and other food products through their retail business, the Soroco Storefront. Kids run the business and get paid for their hours.
Whaley, a graduate of the district who took over for his former ag teacher 15 years ago, teaches students based on his own background in agriculture and also often learns alongside them. Despite never being trained in meat processing, the instructor picked up the food products class this past school year and frequently turns to industry experts who serve as guest teachers and even YouTube videos to understand how to master varied cuts of meat.
The students who walk into his food products course all know what it’s like to go to school in a speck of a town where everyone pretty much knows everyone. But some are more seasoned in farming and ranching than others.
Emily Rossi, who just finished her junior year, belongs to a local ranching family stretching back five generations. Emily, 17, has been a family ranch hand for nearly as long as she can remember, graduating from riding in a tractor while haying and helping her dad deliver calves as a young child to now overseeing her own herd of 20 mother cows and their babies.
Enrolling in the food products class has rounded out her agricultural education by exposing her to the processing side. After taking the class her sophomore year, she became a work-based learning student this past year as a junior, helping other students in the kitchen as they processed two pigs and two beef during their spring semester.
It’s added another stepping stone to her long-term plan to work in marketing for the industry or lobby for agricultural issues at the state or national level.
“This class has just kind of taught me that we have to make that connection with our consumers if we’re going to be in charge of marketing and advocating for the industry,” said Emily, who is also heavily involved in the National FFA Organization. “I feel like sometimes we see in the media kind of this side of agriculture, the processing side specifically, being shown in a negative light because it is the processing of livestock and converting those livestock into meat that we’re going to consume. And so we have to find ways to positively educate our consumers in a way that they’re understanding that this is something that we’ve always been doing … and we’re going to continue doing it in the safest, most sustainable ways that we can.”
Another of Whaley’s students returned to the district this year to begin working as an agriculture science teacher for middle schoolers last fall before graduating from the University of Wyoming this spring.
Bailey Iacovetto, also a fifth-generation rancher who was a student teacher for the district last year, said South Routt School District’s agriculture program not only shaped her decision to teach agriculture but also better primed her to transition into college. She wants to help students develop the kind of critical thinking skills that will empower them to educate others about issues directly impacting farmers and ranchers — like reintroducing wolves into the state — and show them how central agriculture is to their lives.
“We are the backbone to life on earth,” Iacovetto said. “If we didn’t have agriculture, we’d be naked and afraid and hungry.”
And even if South Routt students decide on a career outside agriculture once they leave high school, their teachers know they’ll at least be armed with knowledge to help bridge two very different worlds between the more populated and remote parts of the state.
“There’s a major urban rural divide,” Whaley said, “and it’s education that I think is missing in urban America to educate those people of what it takes to actually put food on their table. Many of those people are three generations removed from a farm or ranch, and food doesn’t come from a grocery store. It comes from somewhere to get to the grocery store.”