The Farm at Butler, which is located on Butler University’s campus, hosted FFA members this week as part of the Career Success Tours offered during the 98th National FFA Convention & Expo. Through touring the farm, members received an up-close look at the environmental service and plant systems career pathways in action.
The one-acre farm is a large garden focused on sustainability, with areas devoted to annual vegetables and fruiting shrubs. Its mission centers on maintaining crops by hand and prioritizing soil health.
“We practice conservation techniques to enhance our soil quality,” says Tim Dorsey, the farm’s manager. “We want to keep our soil covered as much as possible to protect the soil structure. At all times, if we can have living roots in our soil, that’s ideal.”
The tour also showcased the innovation of urban agriculture and how small-scale sustainable practices can have a broader impact.
“I didn’t realize how small-scale a lot of these production farms can be,” says Tri-Valley FFA member Kadence Riley from Illinois. “I kind of always thought of production agriculture as big farms with big machines and stuff like that, but it’s kind of nice to see a farm like this.”
Dorsey adds that although the farm’s work may seem small, he hopes its impact grows. “We hope that some of these things that we experiment with are going to be incorporated into our larger farming systems more and more,” he says.
Career Connections
The Career Success Tours aim to connect FFA members with real-world applications of their classroom learning and expose them to a broad range of career paths. For Owen St. Peter, who’s serving as the vice president of the Tri-Valley FFA Chapter in Illinois, his visit to the farm sparked inspiration.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for [people] wanting to purchase some of the things that they grow here, and there’s a lot of money made off of it,” he says. “I think that if I want to go into something that would be profitable within agriculture, this could be a potential opportunity.”
