High School Students Beef Up Cafeteria Meals

By  |  4 Comments

beef cattle

Every day in the cafeteria at Hagerstown Junior/Senior High School in Wayne County, students are getting a really good taste of what it’s like to raise beef cattle. The school’s “Where’s the Beef?” initiative, a project in which students raise cows on school property, provides enough meat to supply the district with hamburgers all year while giving students a one-of-a-kind, hands-on education in beef production.

Advertisement

Now entering its third year, the project started with an idea to pasture some cows on a section of little-used school land to help keep the grass down.

“I just put an educational flair on it,” says agriculture teacher Nathan Williamson. “Our goal is for the whole school to be involved so we can show everybody that agriculture has a place for them.”

Hagerstown high school beef cattle

Williamson’s ag mechanics students built the fence and refurbished an old bulk bin to hold the feed. Kara Hendrickson’s animal science class does most of the decision-making regarding purchase and care of the cows.

“My kids are involved in the ‘Where’s the Beef?’ program daily, whether it be that we are figuring out how much corn to pull back from the corn plot or how much feed seed or how many cows to buy for the next year,” Hendrickson says. “The kids love it. They’re learning what it takes to raise a cow from weaning to slaughter.”

Hagerstown high school beef cattle

Lucas Artman, a 2015 graduate who took ag classes starting in seventh grade, helped with pasture and fence maintenance and feeding. He says the beef project gives students a good idea of what raising cattle is really like.

“They actually get to see how the process works and how time-consuming animals can be,” Artman says. “And they also get to see the pay-off of it.”

Hagerstown high school beef cattle

One pay-off is the delicious whole-cow hamburger on the lunch menu.

“Imagine a pretty good steak – that’s what it tastes like,” Williamson says, adding that, at 90 percent lean, the meat exceeds new nutrition standards for schools. The program also saves the school money while connecting the dots between farming and food.

“The most rewarding thing is to show people how food gets to your table,” says senior Kendell Combs, who is considering agribusiness as her college major and career. She took animal science in 11th grade “to get a look into the life of the cows,” she says.

Hagerstown high school beef cattle

“Every day, we go down to the pasture and feed and make sure the water is working correctly, and that everything is locked up,” Combs says. “We are in charge of keeping the feed up to date, making sure we have enough in our storage area and keeping the mice out of it. When it comes time to send the cows off to get butchered, we do the math and see what places are the best to send them and what we should be asking the school as far as price per pound, so that’s incorporated into [the project] too.”

Thanks to the “Where’s the Beef?” project, the school has received money to update ag classrooms and is working with Ivy Tech Community College to offer dual enrollment for students pursuing an associate degree in agriculture.

A barn built during the summer, complete with corrals and scales, plus a technology grant to purchase radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags for the cows, will expand the project to include research.

4 Comments

  1. Frank

    August 24, 2015 at 10:18 pm

    This article failed to mention how these cows were taken care of during the summer months while school was out of session and how most kids had no interaction with them until the last two weeks. But that’s none of my business.

  2. Jacqueline Cuthbertson

    January 20, 2018 at 9:54 pm

    U eat violence,u become the violence!,ADHD PTSD,killing students-police, diseases,cancer, hormonal imbalance,rape , domestic violence, climate change.greed/death!karma!
    U people r behind.if u study Martin Luther King he was vegan, Einstein, Jesus. If u want the killing to stop in schools,it start with compassion.when u slaughter animals u get the pain anxiety,PTSD ADHD in yr blood by the time a teenager consumed 20x 720+ animals (14400) deaths he will be on opiods and is a ticking time bomb.grass fed or non it’s death !an animal has the same feeling as a human.what u need to teach is a vegan life style.god is fed up with animal slaughter for experiments, entertainment ,food/lust , furniture/fashion .we don’t need to kill to survive.i have bin for 25 yrs vegan and no health issues,meds or med insurance needed.that saved me for a house 3-400.000$. If we want to save this world (climate change) teach them vegan ! Grow plants stop raping/killing.there r consequences!!! Get with the vegan program .this is serious!

    • Jacqueline Cuthbertson

      January 20, 2018 at 10:01 pm

      And looking at these kids and teachers obesity is another concern.colon cancer ect .teach compassion not death!

      • Lucas

        March 12, 2018 at 10:59 pm

        Jacqueline, I can see you are very frustrated and passionate on your views. However, when has PTSD ever been linked to raising animals to be eaten. They were done so in a humane way and the best way possible. Why put people down if they choose to eat meat? Also, this program made kids realize the importance of life and hard work. They got to see something they put their hard work and dedication turn into something. Maybe you are the one that needs a lesson. You should freshen up on your language, spelling, and sentence structures if you are going to make a valid point. But, as I can see, this was definitely a very opinionated comment. I extremely doubt that because we chose to grow our own beef that we are going to become your so called worst nightmare. Sincerely, a perfectly healthy, non-overweight, beef loving, high-achieving person of society.

Leave a Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

By submitting this form, you accept the Mollom privacy policy.