Coffee with a Farmer

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

For over 20 years, the Center for Land Based Learning has operated the FARMS Leadership Program, which introduces, trains, and recruits high school students for college and career opportunities in agriculture. Here’s Executive Director Mary Kimball.

Kimball… “We run around the state, 16 regions from the Tehama down to Kern, almost every valley county. We've got programs and central coast, south coast, north coast, kind of all over. And they're in-person field days. So the students, high school students on a monthly basis, in all of those different regions have what we call field days. So they're out and learning from farmers and ranchers and resource managers and ag processing and businesses. I mean, they're going to research stations. That's always been our model. We started this in 1993.”

For the first time, farm visits are not an option for the program due to COVID-19. So Mary and her team came up an idea: bring the farm to them.

Kimball … “Over the years, we've certainly got a lot of friends, a lot of farmers, a lot of resource managers, a lot of partners in this program. and let's see if they'd be willing to do these Zoom sessions. We're booked almost all the way through the end of may.

They call the series “Coffee with a Farmer”. Kimball says they are also finding that this new remote farm visit is a way to engage students they couldn’t reach previously. You can find the videos at landbasedlearning.org or the Center for Land Based Learning’s YouTube channel.