Last stand for livestock in suburbia

A crowd gathers and watches as Sergio Picasso, left, and Kacie Nugen push Earl, a stubborn charolais steer, back into the farmhouse where the rest of the steer were staying. ISAAC ARJONILLA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Melissa Russell lives in Buena Park, where the only farm most people know about is Knotts Berry.

But for the past five years, the 19-year-old has brought sheep and goats to the livestock show barns at the OC Fair. She's one of dozens of students immersed in agriculture in the heart of suburbia, because their high schools have farms as well as football fields.

"We're city kids. And we're more likely to go to a neighbor's asking if we can ride in their car, instead of ride their horse," she said. "If it weren't for our schools, we'd never know what (raising livestock) was like."

Russell attended Sunny Hills High School, which has a seven-acre working farm. It's the largest in its district. A handful of Orange County high schools have preserved dots of farm land, some as small as a couple of acres, amid the urban sprawl of Orange County. Among them: Mission Viejo, Orange, La Habra, Sonora and Westminster.

"This area has become so urbanized, it's a way we can learn about rural life," said Alex Maitland, who just finished his freshman year at Mission Viejo.

Living in one of the largest planned communities in the U.S., Alex raised a 121-pound sheep named Edlenor that took first place its division.

Abigail Cho, 14, named her goat Sarah, which she raised as part of her ninth-grade Earth Science project at Sunny Hill.

"I didn't realize they get this big," Abigail said. "I always thought they would be smaller."

While folks in the Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas like to think of themselves as living in farm country, California is the nation's leading agricultural producer. This state sells more than $37 billion each year in tomatoes, strawberries, grapes, almonds, pistachios and milk. And only Texas produces more livestock.

But this is not the San Joaquin Valley. Residents here are known more for wine tastings than wine making. There are barely any orange trees left in Orange County.

"We used to walk through strawberry fields to get to school, but now they're all gone," said Steve Petty, who graduated from Sunny Hills in 1987, long before sending his children there.

One summer, Blake and Maddison Petty went to visit their grandmother on a 47-acre farm in Neosho, Mo., in the southwest corner of the state, near where television producer Paul Henning got the idea for "The Beverly Hillbillies." They spent two weeks with chickens and pigs and cows. Blake was thrown over a fence while trying to ride a donkey. When they came back to the coast they brought back a new love of the farm.

"It changed them," Steve Petty said.

Both ended up among the more than 150 students in the Sunny Hills agriculture program. Maddison, now 18, has raised goats, sheep and steers. Blake, 16, started in the program with an interest in plants but moved to the livestock pen this year.

It's a lesson in Economics as much as it is about animal husbandry. The students have to buy the stock and their feed. A pig or a goat can cost $250, and raising beef cattle can run up to $2,700 each.

At Sunny View, the school pays the costs, and the students pay off their bill by selling the animal, either to private buyers scouting the fair, or at an auction following the competition.

"We have ranches that the school has longstanding relationships with, and the students have to make a good faith deposit, so they have money invested," said Chelsye DeBoor, agriculture teacher at Sunny Hills.

Students usually sell their animals for enough money to break even though, this year, two students showing steer at the fair lost $1,000 or more. DeBoor said the school holds fund-raisers to help defray costs, so the teens can actually put a little money in their pockets. Think of it as a mini farm subsidy.

Blake Petty, meanwhile, has helped spread his love of the farm to the burbs. His neighbors pitched in $242 so he could buy his pig for this year's fair.

These So Cal city kids raise some mighty fine stock, too, said Mike Hall, senior beef cattle specialist with the Animal Science Department at Cal Poly Pomona.

"Most of the kids who come to our program are from Los Angeles and San Francisco, and a lot have never touched an animal," Hall said while judging the show steers in Costa Mesa. "These kids are already ahead of that."

Some will end up continuing their studies in San Luis Obispo or at Chico State. Others are just gaining an appreciation of how to run a business.

"This is about so much more than agriculture," DeBoor said. "They learn how to budget, we have public speaking contests, how to apply for jobs, all the things you need to know as an entrepreneur."

They also learn that the hamburger they order at McDonald's once had a name, weighed 1,200 pounds and could put up a fight getting from the pen to the auction arena.

"You learn you don't want to just order any kind of beef, but you want to look for quality," Melissa Russell said.

At the OC Fair, it's not about the "live" but the "stock." The steers aren't entered into a cattle competition. It's called beef. Chickens are market broilers. The lambs are judged on what kind of chops will go onto the grill. Chris Cully of the Fullerton chapter of Future Farmers of America aptly named his 237-pound pig "Riblet."

Those who don't sell their animals at auction may end up having them processed to take home to their freezer.

Alex Maitland won't be taking his prize-winning sheep back to Mission Viejo.

"My mom just became a vegetarian," he said, "so that's not going to happen."


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