Student tells how farm program advances, shaped him

From the Daily Courier.

My name is Lee Carpenter and I am a senior at R-S Central High School and the FFA president this year, and I am here to tell you about some of the things we have been doing.

Four years ago, when I was a freshman, Mr. (Brandon) Higgins was just taking over as sole Ag Teacher at R-S Central. We had only 75 students taking agricultural classes. Our agriculture program was nothing like it is today.

Our greenhouse was dilapidated and animal science wasn't even offered. Today, we have a new green house and a 30-acre farm all built with a $60,000 grant from Foothills Connect and a LOT of hard work from our FFA.

Our animal science and greenhouse program is now booming! Instead of just Mr. Higgins, we now have Mr. and Mrs. Higgins and our program is now 225-plus kids strong.

Our new barn, built last year, is the centerpiece of our Animal Science Laboratory. We have 25 Nubian dairy goats, 6 sows, 30 feeder pigs, and raised 100 broilers this year.

Instead of using a bulldozer to clear our 30 acres of land, over grown with pine trees, we use our goats, pigs, and chickens.

First, in the clearing process, we use our goats to clean out all the underbrush, cut our trees down and use the pigs to root up small stumps.

Then we run our chickens over it to reapply the nitrogen and build back to the soil that it lost during the many years of cotton farming. The chickens return approximately 300 pounds of nitrogen per acre to the ground and then we process and sell them to the community.

We are benefiting two ways from the chickens - by selling them to the community and getting nitrogen from them. The way the prices of fertilizer is right now it is a lot cheaper to get it from the chickens.

We show our Nubian dairy goats at ADGA-sanctioned shows. The feeder pigs we sell to the community and top hogs go to restaurants in Charlotte. Last year, we built our new 28-by-60 Atlas greenhouses.

The greenhouse is up and we use it for raised bed production. In our raised beds we have arugula, spinach, squash blossoms and salad mix, but our main focus is winter strawberries.

Our strawberries are from piedmont research station and we should begin picking them around Christmas.

All of our produce is marketed through Farmersfreshmarket.com. Farmers Fresh Market was begun as a way for farmers in Rutherford County to market local foods to white table cloth restaurants in Charlotte via the Internet.

In the future we plan to expand the barn, convert our old greenhouse into an aquaponic/hydroponic system so that we may raise Tilapia.

The past four years in FFA have shaped me in many ways. I have gotten to travel. My sophomore year we won the state Land Judging competition and traveled to Oklahoma City, OK for the national competition.

We've traveled all over the state going to livestock, or agriculture mechanics competitions and leadership development workshops. Just recently we traveled to Indianapolis to attend the 82nd National FFA Convention.

I've also learned that you don't need hundreds of acres to produce crops if you are skilled in marketing. I hope to further what I learned at R-S Central at NC State where I hope to pursue a career in Ag Education or Soil Science.