Instructor John Schmidt’s Agriculture Construction and Welding class has built nine city-sized chicken coops now for sale at the Career Academy. (Photo/Nancy Hanson.)

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

If you’re thinking of combating egg prices with a backyard flock of chickens, Moorhead High School’s ag construction class has just the coop for you.
Instructor John Schmidt’s Ag Construction and Mechanics students have been building chicken coops at the Career Academy. The small coops are just the right size, he says, for a quartet of cluckers. Sales of the $200 units go to support the school’s fledgling FFA chapter.
Once, agriculture education was a staple of Moorhead’s high school curriculum. Today, 45 years after those classes were dropped, they’re going strong again since Schmidt joined the faculty to teach them in 2022. One of his main initial goals, he said at the time, was revival of FFA. The Moorhead chapter received its charter at the state FFA convention in April 2024.
Older generations may recall the national student organization as Future Farmers of America. Chartered by President Truman in 1950, it was long associated with youth planning careers in farming. But that has changed, along with the focus of ag classes themselves.
Since 1988, it has been known simply as FFA. There’s a reason for that, says Schmidt: Ag careers today extend far from the fields and the ag classes’ core units of plant science, animal science and domestication, and natural resources.
“Every single career in Fargo-Moorhead has some sort of connection with agriculture,” the Twin Cities native explains. “From banking to heavy machinery sales, from finance to food processing, from the legal field to real estate, from advertising to news media, it seems like pretty much everything has its roots in agriculture. It’s more involved in everything that we do as a society than, I think, people realize.”
One example, he says, is the construction trades. “Half of construction around here deals with some sort of AFNR structure or AFNR process,” he points out. The acronym stands for “agriculture, food and natural resources.” That’s why one of the core classes he’s teaching this year is Ag Construction and Mechanics. If students someday use those skills on their own farms, they’ll be essential. But they also open the doors to ag-related careers.
FFA emphasizes the breadth of career possibilities. Among its competitions focusing on raising crops and livestock, it provides opportunities for members to show off their skills in CDE – Career Development Experiences. The dozen members of the fledgling Moorhead chapter have shown off their knowledge and preparation for careers both on or off the farm in three competitions this winter at December’s Little International at North Dakota State University and two CDE events held at the University of Minnesota-Crookston, The Minnesota campus hosted Agriculture and Natural Resources Activities Day in early February and, this week, the regional CDE contest to qualify FFA members for their state competition at the annual FFA convention in late April.
In CDE competition, individuals and teams of up to four show off their knowledge and insight in their choice of up to 25 career areas. In the ag sales category, for example, Schmidt says they chose a product and created a sales plan. They spoke about the benefits of their product and how it benefits the three clients they’ve targeted, creating a sales plan to reach each prospect.
The MHS FFA team placed fourth in their first-time contest at the Little International in hippology. (Hippology is the study of horses.)
“Competing in CDEs goes beyond what we can do in the classroom,” Schmidt notes. “From networking with like-minded students to putting their broader knowledge to work in a different context, they get a broader feel for ag-related paths they may take in their future.”
To find out more about purchasing the student-built chicken coops – and support Moorhead FFA activities – contact MoorheadFFA@gmail.com.