- So in March of 2020, the way that The Big Fresno Fair does business changed forever.

Everything was shut down.

And our employees all at home and things were very grim as they were across the nation.

- At first I kinda was like, okay, this is a joke.

We're gonna have an extra week of spring break.

They want me back.

And then, as I kept going, I was like, "Oh my gosh we're not gonna be able to go back to school!"

And so, yeah, it was really devastating and all of the shows that had gotten canceled and everything it really hit hard.

- Yeah, exactly.

That's perfect.

It's really hard for our students to stay engaged.

Now, if you take a student who signed up for ROP welding and expected to be building a really cool thing is that they do in that class like trailers and barbecues and whatever they dream up.

And then now they're online for two hours a day with their teacher, doing notes and watching YouTube videos.

It's really hard to keep them engaged in something like that.

(goat bleating) - That's one of the hardest things about distance learning is we have students who have been really successful in the past and are sinking right now.

- I'm gonna be honest at the beginning, I was not motivated at all.

It was just so hard to look at the positive side of this situation.

- It's challenging for them to wanna to sit there for 90 minutes and kinda be lectured to or show them a video, when in reality they wanna be doing.

They joined agriculture to get their hands dirty, to learn the skills that they need to be successful in a job.

And it's really hard to teach that over a computer screen.

- When I found out that we're gonna do the fair virtually, I thought it'd be a little rough, cause trying to keep your pig in that camera, try not to go too far.

It would probably be like a little rough.

- Nobody will ever understand until you actually do it.

What our youth go through, when they decide to exhibit livestock.

- FFA motto is learning to do, doing to learn, and we're doing that component of learning to do but we're missing that component of doing to learn which is always been the most successful part of agricultural education.

- [Narrator] Production funding for American Grown.

My job depends on ag, provided by James G. Parker insurance associates.

Insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By GAR Bennett the growing experts in water, irrigation, nutrition, and crop care advice in products.

We help growers feed the world.

By Golden State Farm Credit, building relationships with rural America, by providing and financial services.

By BRANDT, professional agriculture.

Proudly supporting the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world everyday.

By UN Wired Broadband.

Today's internet for rural Central California, keeping Valley Agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products.

Dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families to grow our nation's food.

(guitar music) - So for me, showing cattle is a way that I can earn money towards my college degree.

And so, as much as I love to show and I learned as many great lessons, it's really gonna help me to be able to further my career in Agriculture.

- [ Interviewer] Maybe he's not awake yet this morning.

- So when we first started buying cattle and like last August, obviously COVID, wasn't a thing.

We had no idea.

So we spent all this money on good steers and plan to take them state fair and Fresno Fair and all these shows.

And so, once you have raised them for six, eight months and you're ready to go, and then the shows get canceled, it really messes with your plans.

(upbeat music) I said, I will forever win the tug of war.

- [ Interviewer] Now what's this guy's name?

- This is Rip.

- [ Interviewer] Rip?

Like after the character in "Yellowstone"?

- Yeah.

Right when we got out of school and things started to get canceled, like farther in advance, not just, the next week, whatever.

Kinda started to realize, my junior year is gonna be way different than it has been for everybody else.

And I realized, you only have four years to show in FFA.

Five years so if you show as a graduate, but I realized, I think one of those years was gonna get taken from me.

And it was really sad.

- Honestly, in our minds we thought, okay, this'll be a month, two months.

We're not gonna be a fair that's gonna be affected by this.

We're in October.

I mean, there's just no way that this is gonna keep going until October.

And we really had that very strong feeling, for many months.

And we, when people would ask, we would say, yeah with Big Fresno Fairs happening, we will be here.

This is what we do.

And, it wasn't really until probably June, where we kinda started seeing a little bit more of the writing on the wall, and really had to start kinda looking at what that meant.

(upbeat music) - So FFA is one of the three rings that encompass agriculture education.

It focuses on leadership, development, personal growth, and getting kids ready for a career.

So on March 13th of last year, we got an email from our school district that said we would no longer be teaching in person due to COVID.

And, we had maybe like a week of nothing where I think they just kinda made it our spring break if I remember correctly.

And then we came back to school and we had to create three weeks worth of packets for our students.

And they came and picked it up.

And that three weeks is when the district kinda figured out what was gonna happen with our students.

Then we got a schedule and we started distance learning in April.

- Agricultural education consists of three components, FFA, supervised agricultural experience and classroom laboratory.

Those, we call that the three circle model and those three components are the reason agricultural education is so successful.

When COVID happened , you are now eliminating parts of that component.

Part of those three circles.

Our students have also missed out on the hands-on experience at the farm.

We have a 20 acre farm here.

We have animals that students participate in, with COVID.

That's just simply not an option.

We were able to maintain some of our student experiences until the end of child cello fair.

And then from that point, basically the student involvement on the farm has been non-existent.

- Our department is a very hands-on learn by doing kinda department.

Our kids are constantly doing labs, working with their hands, building things, welding, and to take your curriculum that is completely hands-on and try to develop lessons that are online using the computer, videos, finding websites it's actually been really difficult for us.

- [Interviewer] What kind of animals do you show?

- I show like hogs or what people know like pigs.

My name is Nash Fisher and I am a sixth grader at Red Bank Elementary.

(upbeat music) (pig snorting) Well, one of the point that I figured out that there was no fair.

My family started talking really like there's probably gonna be no fair this year.

Cause like COVID going on.

- So our 4-H or FFA programs are they are so robust and there are so many, little fingers that come off of those programs.

And there is honestly something for every child who has an interest in anything.

For those youth who are really excited and want to have something to do with production agriculture and livestock, and those kinda things, showing these animals, it's a huge sense of responsibility.

- It didn't really change much cause we were gonna go probably raise our pigs the same way we do.

Madam was gonna call a few people that he knew and saw my pig.

- It's a tireless job that these kids have.

And you can tell, there are kids who do it really well and there are kids who, don't put as much effort into it.

And those kids who do really well are the one's who they thrive.

And this is their mojo.

This is what they, this is their baseball or this is their softball.

This is a competitive sport.

- When I found out the we're gonna do the fair virtually, I thought it'd be a little rough cause try and keep your pig in that camera.

Try not to go too far.

It would probably be like a little rough for some pigs over, the pluck to run.

You'd have to try to keep them calm down and keep them in the right spot.

- [Interviewer] Are you nervous right now?

Getting ready to show.

- Yeah, pretty nervous.

Cause you don't know how your pigs gonna act with a ton of different other pigs.

- [Interviewer] What are you hoping to get through this thing?

- Probably around maybe third.

- Lesly Madriz is a current student of mine.

And I have had her almost her entire high school career.

- When we first got the news of COVID-19.

It was probably the month of March.

Our teachers had told us that we were probably gonna have a week off and returning from that week we're probably gonna get packets because they thought that we were gonna get sent home for a virtual setting.

I think it's very difficult.

This setting I get distracted so easily, learning isn't as easy as it used to be.

And do the fact that I'm a visual learner school has been the most difficult I have ever felt that before.

They say your junior year is the hardest.

But personally, this virtual setting has hit my senior year, really hard.

- So Madera South, a little bit different.

We have a really large urban population in our program.

And so most of our students actually raise their market animals for the fair on our school farm.

Once school got put on distance learning, they didn't want the students coming out and the fair canceled.

So we had to figure out a way to get these animals sold.

So our students didn't lose all of their money.

Luckily our community is super supportive and a lot of them privately purchased animals, and the advisors got them butchered and processed and our farm bureau which is actually across the street, they put on a sale for us.

But with the school closures and go into distance learning.

And that meant that for the next fair, we as a department made a decision to not sponsor our kids going on the school farm.

So if they wanted to raise an animal at home, and try to go to the next fair, they would have to do it on their own.

The fair actually ended up counseling before our kids bought animals where most of our kids bought animals.

And so luckily we didn't have to deal with that kind of a situation.

But I know of a lot of schools that had to do virtual shows, and virtual sales in order to help their kids sell their animals.

- So I always just take a few minutes to comb them since they shed out a lot.

Well, I would always do it at our school.

Our campus we have a school rabbit farm.

So that's where I would comb him every day after school.

But because of COVID, I had to bring him home and now I'm doing it in my backyard.

Like five months now it's been five months since I've brought him home.

Another thing that I do is, I clip their nails.

And one thing at school we would always have like the kids that were in the rabbit barn would always be there to help me clip their nails.

But because I'm at home and my siblings are always busy or my mom's always doing some other task, I'd have to learn how to clip as nails on my own.

- It's a difficult situation to see students struggling.

And I've reached out to students.

One student in particular is a senior.

And this is his go-to year to finish strong.

And, it's difficult because these students bring so much to the class, especially the student in particular and to not have him in classes is a challenge.

And to see students struggling is a challenge and it is hard to gauge how we can help them when we don't have any contact with them except to via email or phone call or video.

- This is what's called a double blower.

So it's like a giant hairdryer basically.

And we use it to dry their hair obviously but also to blow out all of the debris and dust and everything that gets in them overnight.

- [Interviewer] All right.

Let's go to the beauty salon.

- All right.

(upbeat music) You can buy show cattle from anywhere from 1500 bucks 1200 bucks all the way up to people spend crazy amounts, 30,000 I mean.

You can, some of the really big national show winners, they'll buy steers for over a $10000.

- [Interviewer] Is this an everyday thing or is this just what you do before you're gonna show it?

- This is an everyday thing so we're not soaking every day, cause it dries out their hide a lot.

And so, but we wash them, rinse them every day.

Sometimes twice a day in the summer when it's really hot.

If you spend a $10000 on a steer their hair's perfect.

Their left ear is perfect.

There is, everything's gonna be right on.

To people who spend a $10000 on the steers.

They're not looking to make money there.

It's really hard to do that.

They're looking to win.

They wanna go win a national show or when a really big show, at least.

- [Interviewer] When you're showing a steer, there's a visual aspect of it.

And there's also the weight and the structure of the animal.

- Yes.

So, like I said before, it's like a beauty pageant.

So you want that has a lot of hair because then they look bigger and they basically just look fluffier.

And the hair helps you can when you clip them which is when you give him a haircut the hair helps to hide any kind of imperfections that they have.

You can kinda clip it out of them.

And so even if you don't have a really perfect steer if he has a lot of hair you can kind of hide some things that aren't as desirable.

So there are ways that you can hold cattle that's not bad for them at all.

It doesn't hurt them.

You just feed them different.

They get different kinds of foods, different types of stuff in their food.

That way they don't just keep growing and growing and growing.

Well, this is where the magic happens.

So this supplement here, it helps him grow hair that has kelp in it and can just help them get a little natural boost.

And this supplement it's called crushing feminine.

It smells, I don't really know how to explain that smell.

It has a very distinct smell.

- [Interviewer] Let me smell.

- It smells like wine fermentation to me.

- [Interviewer] That's actually pretty good smelling.

- They smell good, it's not a bad smell.

- [Interviewer] I put some milk on that in a bowl in the morning.

- Oh, I don't know about that but it helps kind of keep their look youthful.

So when they get big like that sometimes they get kinda really flubbery.

This is kinda helps keep them tight.

- [Interviewer] Can I get some of that to go.

- I know, right, me too.

(soft music) - For me, the biggest change in developing curriculum is how do I take something that I physically handed to my students and put it digitally.

I'm a paper person.

I love having it there and going over with my students and trying to figure out how to make it work in Google docs or something that, taking a PDF that I would normally use and like get them to type in it is been mind blowing.

That's been my biggest struggle.

My other ag teacher friends, I call them like how do you do it?

Or luckily we have some really like techie people in our department and they're able to help me out with that.

Other than that, it's just taking those hands-on group projects and trying to figure out how can you mimic that in a situation where they are not allowed to get together, to work on it.

- Weirdly.

I actually spend more time with my animals now that I'm at home, than I did before in school.

Because in school I would just go to the rabbit barn and feed them.

But now, because I have him at home, when I get bored sometimes I take the rabbits out of their cage or I go outside and pet my sheep.

So last year I was supposed to be able to raise a meat rabbit for the Madera fair.

And I had already had paid for my rabbit.

I was just getting ready for the rabbit to be born and for them to give it to me so I can start raising it.

But then the whole COVID situation popped up and Madera fair said they were gonna cancel their fair.

So what ended up happening is I ended up getting my refund and I wasn't able to show this year.

- Attendance is up, but what I've noticed is the students that aren't here, really are not here.

I have students, I haven't seen in eight weeks.

I have students I haven't seen in five weeks.

So the students that are not showing up are not showing up at all.

It's not just a little bit here and there.

And sometimes you would see that with in-person teaching, but with distance learning they're just completely off the grid and I have no communication with them.

- I really miss the interaction, like one of my best or like my favorite parts is getting to know them and just looking at them and knowing like, Hey, what is one of your goals for the year?

And helping them succeed and earn that goal.

And that's one of the things that I worry about the most is that they're gonna look back at this year and if they're seniors or juniors or even freshmen, any grade they're gonna look back and think like what a wasted year.

I didn't get to do anything that I wanted to do.

(orchestral music) - It's hard for me to talk about miss Luxon because of the fact that she's helped me so much.

I think she's one of the first person that ever saw potential in me.

Standing here seeing that I was able to be a regional officer, a sectional officer.

It's crazy to see because freshman me, would have never thought I was capable of that.

Ms. Luxon was not only a mentor but she was also like a second parent to me, due to the fact that she always wants to see other succeed, whether it's finding their personal pro or finding their passion.

I know Luxon is always someone that I can count on.

And that will always believe in me, even when I don't see the potential in myself.

(soft music) (upbeat music) - Quite a bit of attitude, pretty shaky there.

And then when we studied this one from his side he's putting in terms of being laid off from his back.

But when we go in and send them right, we wanna train them up just a little bit, but that's getting off this one.

That's a real power also in terms of his muscle in shape.

So I wanna go ahead and commend you for your feeding on that one.

I'm here today.

Just has a little bit of that attitude.

- I've been in 4-H for maybe two, like about two years.

This is my second year.

My two older brothers showed.

I kind of learned about their pigs a little bit.

I dive in and like I didn't know how to walk a pig.

Cause like maybe my brother was gone at a party.

But I will tell me, pull this pig and wake it.

- [Interviewer] How'd you do?

- I got first, the breed champions.

- [Interviewer] You were wanting to just get third, right?

- Yeah.

- [Interviewer] How are you feeling right now?

- Good.

- [Interviewer] Why do you think you got first?

What made it happen for you?

- Well, first cause nobody in my class I guess.

But also I walk my big and paid attention to the judge.

Really good.

- [Interviewer] Good job buddy, you earned it.

Feel pretty good?

- Yeah.

- It would have been so much easier to throw in the towel.

My kids exhibit.

And so, my son had a steer.

And so, when this all started in March, I mean, we looked at each other and tried to decide, well, do we keep him do we, just sell him now and cut our losses.

So, we turned our steer out to pasture for a few months until we figured out what was really gonna happen.

And then, brought him back in and got him ready for fair.

But, it's the same thing.

It's just been an emotional roller coaster.

- The whole process itself has been kind of difficult.

Like there's definitely positives.

And also, I try to remember every day is like, even if you're struggling, something good is happening.

I'm learning new technology, getting to know kids through different ways, there's always gonna be a golden light in whatever we're doing.

So even though we're struggling as teachers, parents students, we're learning new things every day.

And also we keep having to focus on.

- [Interviewer] This is a new steer that you're gonna have for next year.

- Yes.

So Rip was my 2020 Fresno Fair calf and he is my 2021 state fair steer.

- [Interviewer] And that's Sam.

- Yes, this is Samuel.

- [Interviewer] And what kind of a steer of Sam?

- Samuel is pure bred, short horn.

So he'll show in a completely different division than Rip.

Rip goes in the black cross division.

He's not very fond of people yet.

- [Interviewer] When will be the last time you see Rip?

- So after the show we sell him.

Usually barely two weeks here coming up.

- [Interviewer] Two weeks.

It's gonna be a sad day though.

When he goes off.

- It is a very sad day.

And luckily I do have Sammy for next year.

So I kinda switch my focus.

But it is a sad day definitely.

- [Interviewer] Part of the circle of lifestyle.

- It is, yes.

- [Interviewer] It's part of what we do.

- Yeah.

Like I said, I did everything I could to take care of him while he was here.

He was treated like a king.

- I think Lesly has continued to be a positive individual through this distance learning.

She still shows up to class and enthusiastic to learn.

She always has a positive attitude when she's there on camera during class.

There's no doubt that there are probably some struggles but she is one of those people that is adaptive and will be a better individual because of it.

She's gonna become stronger, because she was able to navigate through these challenges successfully.

- Even though I can't be there, it's still as good as it could be.

That class.

I have learned more than any other class that I have ever been with.

And I know that the stuff that I learned in her class, I'm gonna be able to implement it in my life every single day.

- Sorry my mom's calling me.

Sorry.

Hello.

I'm on the interview.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Production funding for American grown.

My job depends on AG provided by James G. Parker insurance associates.

Ensuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years .

By Gar Bennett the growing experts in water, irrigation, nutrition and crop care advice and products.

We help growers feed the world.

By Golden State Farm Credit, building relationships with rural America by providing ag financial services.

By Brandt professional agriculture proudly supporting the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Un Wired Broadband today's internet for rural central California, keeping Valley Agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families to grow our nation's food.

(upbeat music)