From Conception to Cow on a Billboard

I’m not sure exactly at which meeting the idea was hatched, but I know who hatched it: Myron.

I first met Myron years ago at an Ag Advisory Board meeting. Our county has a Farmland Preservation Ordinance, which is mostly a feel-good ordinance meant to recognize farms in the county, but the ordinance also created a seven member Ag Advisory Board whose purpose is to advise county commissioners on issues pertaining to cows and corn and such. Back then, one of my job responsibilities was to be the staff liaison for the Ag Advisory Board. Liaison is a high falutin word for complaint herder. 

Some farmers could be pretty bitter and acidic in their complaints (who can blame them), but Myron never took that approach. He was more of a positive lamentor. “It’s a comin’,” Myron would tell me, “maybe not in my lifetime, but in yours. We cain’t do nothing but try to slow it down.” 

The “it” he referred to was development, the bogeyman of farmers in North Carolina. Mryon has indeed lived long enough to see another surge of widespread farmland loss and the subsequent loss of farms and farmers in the county, especially in the last five years due to our proximity to Charlotte. People are now moving to the rural ring of counties outside of Charlotte. The only thing popping up faster than housing developments here are fire ant hills, and the latter are probably better constructed. 

But when agriculture depends on global markets and when rampant development is a response to a national shortage for affordable housing, what can you do at a local level to make a large scale difference, or any difference? 

A lost cause has never stopped Myron. At a board meeting, Myron hatched a new idea. “I was a thinkin,” Myron said, “it’s a shame our community college doesn’t have an ag degree.” 

That thought grew into a mission for our Ag Advisory Board. Three out of our four high schools in the county have ag programs, so the board got proactive and surveyed the local high school ag students to gauge interest in continuing their ag education at the community college. Armed with statistics, the board invited a college administrator to attend an Ag Advisory Board meeting, which may have been a culture shock for the ultra professional and sophisticated Dean of Academic Affairs, but she returned time and time again and helped guide the board through the process and red tape of creating a new degree and the board helped guide her on what classes might be most applicable and beneficial for students in the county. 

Three years later, after many meetings, the Cleveland Community College Animal Science degree was officially hatched and the college unveiled a billboard advertising the program. One board member (there is always one) was upset because the billboard featured a holstein instead of an angus cow. 

“Fiddle sticks,” Myron said, “I don’t care if it’s a longhorn, there’s are cows on a billboard. We ought to be happy about that.”

The college then hired a bright young go-getter to build the program, and she has done a great job of increasing enrollment every year. I’ve even taught a few classes and have enjoyed passing along my extensive knowledge of what not to do when it comes to farming. This semester, I’m teaching basic farm maintenance–and my primary learning objective is for students to learn how to maintain farm stuff while also maintaining all ten fingers.

“All you can do is try,” Myron likes to say. Indeed, you never know what can happen when one person starts thinking and a group of people start trying. In the grand scheme of things, the creation of an ag degree at a community college may not seem like much, but it’s not nothing. It has already made a difference–one of the first graduates from the program now works down the hall from me in the Extension office.

Here is a great video about Myron that highlights his love devotion to farmland preservation. I make an appearance on the tailgate.