On Monday morning, six Tomales High School students in William Costanzo’s Soil Chemistry class sat hunched over their school-bought laptops as they waded through an introductory presentation and brief assignment on the basics of pH measurements. It’s a common classroom scene, save for the unique context: this class, for the first time in the school’s history, is geared toward teaching not only the technical science behind agriculture, but the practical know-how necessary to pursue a future career in agriculture.
Later in the week, Mr. Costanzo’s students will ditch the computers and launch headlong into an experimental lab to conduct chemical testing for soil nutrients. Simple enough to be performed at home yet thorough enough to inculcate fundamental concepts, these labs represent the crux of the class. So far, students have grown lima beans, tested soil permeability, analyzed soil composition, dried out dirt in the microwave to determine bulk density and—to the joy of all—built mock models of soil layers by stacking mounds of marshmallows and other candies, which they later ate.
Next semester, Mr. Costanzo wants his students to do an all-class project on a nearby ranch.
“This class was designed as a vocational approach,” said Mr. Costanzo, who has taught at Tomales for the past 10 years and also teaches welding and floral design. “There are a lot of hands-on applications.”
In a community composed predominantly of farmers, the students are engaged in—even enthralled by—an otherwise mundane sort of science course, knowing that the lessons are actually useful to themselves, their families and West Marin in general.
“What I want to do, I don’t need to know about how fast a ball drops,” said Jeanette Furlong, a sophomore whose family raises cattle, sheep and lambs in Tomales. “It’s more so I know about the grass, so that the animals stay healthy.”
The Soil Chemistry class marks the first in a trio of yearlong courses that make up the school’s new Agri-Science Pathway program, for which the state doled out around $200,000 in grant money in May. Spread out over a four-year period, the grant pays for professional teacher training, the chance to attend student leadership conferences, lab equipment and a new van for the program. In total, the state awarded over $4.5 million in grant money to a consortium of 16 high schools on the northern California coast.
Tomales High School was selected to be the consortium’s pilot school for the Soil Chemistry class, Mr. Costanzo said. The school will also soon offer the other two courses: Sustainable Ag Biology in the 2016-17 school year and Agri-science Systems Management the year after.
Tomales High has had an agricultural program since 1929. But what sets these classes apart from previous iterations of the program, Mr. Costanzo said, is that they will include a beefed-up agricultural curriculum while also satisfying state standards—unlike past watered-down, solely state-compliant versions.
“In the past, agriculture teachers have taken regular science classes and tried to make Ag fit into them,” Mr. Costanzo said in an email. “By doing that, we had taken out a lot of the agriculture from our courses to meet state standards.”
The three classes meet University of California requirements for college credit and were designed by several teachers throughout the state last year to meet the state’s newest science standards for public schools.
Mr. Costanzo is ironing out the details for how his classes would count toward college and university credits. College credit, however, is not where the buck stops for the Ag Pathway program outside classrooms in Tomales. All students who enroll in an Ag class gain membership into the school’s Future Farmers of America chapter, of which there are currently 45 members at Tomales.
As part of that membership, students have to complete what’s called a “Supervised Ag Experience,” a simulated market season that also functions as each Soil Chemistry student’s end-of-the-semester project. For these projects, students track profit margins involved with purchasing supplies and raising revenues accrued from seasonal sales of cattle and crops. Though not required, students may later present their projects at state and national conventions such as the Chico State Field Day.
Ms. Furlong is one of the students planning to enter her own project into these conventions. She has been testing to see the difference in the size and health that results from feeding one set of lambs only alfalfa and another set both alfalfa and grains.
Already, she has witnessed first-hand the toll that the drought has been taking on ranches, which have had to substitute alfalfa for grass in large quantities to keep cattle yields stable. By using the same soil testers at home that she uses in Soil Chemistry, Ms. Furlong can tell that the lack of rain is depleting the overall nutrient level in the grass.
“I haven’t seen the full effect yet,” said Ms. Furlong, who is the F.F.A. chapter’s reporter and media manager. “But hopefully I will once we get some rain.”