By AUSTIN BAXLEY

Yantis ISD secondary principal

(Editor’s note: This article appears in the October 2025 edition of magazine for the Texas Association of Community Schools)

In the fall of 2024, the Agriculture Education Department of Yantis High School wanted to create an authentic farm experience for its students by designing, building, and maintaining a small chicken farm on the school’s campus that would be built, cared for and operated by students.

To begin, the agricultural mechanics classes designed, budgeted and built a modern chicken coop, fenced in a chicken run and modified an existing structure on campus to create a shade area for a flock of 15 chickens donated by a local farmer.

Once established, agriculture students have been responsible for their daily care – maintaining their food and water, gathering eggs, clipping wings as needed, cleaning the coop and caring for the occasional sick chicken.

As the program has evolved, the students have also begun raising chicks for the future growth of the flock in a separate structure.

The program has increased student involvement in agriculture classes and brought different groups of learners together to achieve a common goal.

Students learned practical skills in construction techniques and concepts through the building of the coop, fencing and shade area for the chickens.

They’ve also gotten hands-on experience learning how to care for the poultry and the process of marketing and selling their eggs, an agricultural product.

Community members are free to purchase surplus eggs in an honor-system box near the Elementary School entrance. The profits are used to finance the costs of the project and invest in its future growth.

In that regard, it’s noteworthy that this project is now self-supporting.

This ongoing multidisciplinary project has been effective at giving students firsthand knowledge of how farm-to-table agriculture can work, with the added bonus of connecting students, teachers and community members across the district in a variety of ways.

Some examples: the school’s chickens have also been the subjects of paintings by art classes; the chicken farm is near the elementary playground and has been used as a hands-on classroom for elementary science teachers; and students in the culinary arts program use the eggs produced by the chickens in their cooking.

The project has been a great success as students from pre-K to 12th grade have enjoyed the hands-on learning opportunities afforded by the little chicken farm – and the chickens have become unofficial mascots of the agriculture education program.