Our K-12 school district serves a rural population of students which range in geography along 60 miles of the I-15 corridor in SW Montana. These students work hard to take full advantage of the opportunities available to them.
Our school is the center of our community and the students work hard to support our community by participating in community activities and service projects.
Every student is needed to make our extracurricular activities possible. Our students enjoy a bond with their peers that is unusual in more urban situations.
My Project
The Agricultural Production classes at our school focus on teaching students how their food is grown and produced, with hands on activities and lessons. Students have been involved with producing the beef for the school hot lunch program for the past two years. The students helped design a cattle pen and shelter, balanced nutritional rations, fed, watered and cared for the steers. Carcass quality, feed conversion ratios, and cost of average daily gain were figured by the students after the cattle were processed. The resulting beef was utilized in our hot lunch program this academic school year. This program is currently in it's second year. In addition we have a school greenhouse on campus that allows us to learn hands on lessons about seed science, plant nutritional needs and supplementation, germination rates, plant growth rates, and seedling and transplant care and strategies. Ideally we would like to grow produce for our hot lunch program. Unfortunately with our elevation and climate we have a very limited growing season outdoors and even with the school greenhouse we struggle to extend our growing season enough to do so.
An indoor hydroponics system will give students K-12 the opportunity to explore the hydroponic plant industry, allow us to grow produce year round, and supplement our hot lunch program with student grown produce.
This system will facilitate wintertime hands on instruction in a discipline that we can historically only teach in the fall and very late spring. Our community has 45 frost free days total and the growing season for non cold hardy plants can only be extended by heating the greenhouse. This comes at a non efficient expense.
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