Last month, Allen Community College voted to sell the school’s student-operated farm.
On Tuesday, more than two dozen passionate backers of the farm turned out to urge ACC’s board of trustees to reverse course.
The students, staff and community members gathered in the first rows of the college’s lecture hall aligned themselves behind the comments of their appointed spokesman, Iola veterinarian — and longtime defender of the college farm — Darrell Monfort.
Before enumerating the menu of positive aspects the farm affords both the college and the wider community, Monfort politely chided the board for the course of actions that had brought them to this point.
The thrust of Monfort’s complaint was that the decision to sell the farm was made with insufficient knowledge of the farm’s importance — a fact, claimed Monfort, resulting from the college’s reluctance to regularly convene and consult the ag advisory committee as well as the nearly total lack of agricultural experience among the college’s current roster of administrators.
“My understanding,” announced Monfort, “is that you haven’t had an ag advisory meeting for at least two years.” Neglecting the counsel of the ag committee, he continued, “you’re probably never going to make different decisions than you have, because you haven’t had two sides of the issue presented to you.”
According to Monfort, potential enrollees have “already dropped ACC off their list of colleges because of the loss of the farm. … I’m told we’re going to keep the [livestock] judging team. But I don’t think that position is even being advertised. These kids who want to come to ACC for judging, they don’t even know who their coach is going to be. These kids aren’t coming here. You’re losing some great students.”
Plus, continued Monfort, you’re endangering the likelihood that ag students further down the pipeline will choose ACC.
“The farm is an asset to the whole community,” stressed Monfort, pointing to the many educational events the farm hosts for area children. The young man or woman from a nearby town, who visited the farm for an afternoon as a first-grader, who came again as a fourth-grader, and who then took advantage of the facilities as a high school vo-ag student — that young person would be, assuming the farm was preserved, poised to make ACC their college of choice.
Donors, too, speculates Monfort, may reject ACC on the grounds that the school hasn’t shown sufficient constancy to a program that was designed to nurture the ag department in the long-term.
Monfort and his allies were also unmoved by any claim that the college was relinquishing the farm as a cost-saving measure.
Firstly, argued Monfort, replacing the farm manager with an ag recruiter — as the board has proposed — will be a “financial wash.” (Full details of the trustees’ reasons for selling the farm appeared in the Jan. 15 edition of the Register.)
Secondly, Monfort pointed to the value of the farm’s current herd, which “now stands ready to contribute to the farm finances. … The revenue generated from the sale [of the farm], if placed in an investment fund, will generate the same return as the sale of calves from the cow herd at current rates.
“We’d sure hate to see that herd go to waste. These are assets that have been built up over a long time.
“If you don’t like the dollars given to the farm,” continued Monfort, then ration the outlay as you would with any other program. “But it doesn’t mean you drop the farm.”
Where the college has proposed replacing the farm with a more pointed system of internships or apprenticeship opportunities at farms in greater Allen County, Monfort asked the trustees not to ignore the positive symbiosis created when a farm is part and parcel of an institution of advanced learning. The veterinarian imagined a scenario in which an ag student would have his soil sample analyzed in the school’s chemistry department — a transaction valuable to both the ag student and science major.
