This story originally appeared in the August 2024 edition of Town&Gown magazine.
During her nine years in 4-H, 17-year-old Jillian Anderson has raised pigs, lambs, dairy cows and heifers. She has baked and sewed and created tie-dye t-shirts to show at the Centre County Grange Fair and Encampment. She’s president of the Centre County 4-H Teen Council and has traveled to Texas and Minnesota on group exchange programs.
The most meaningful part of 4-H for the Centre Hall teen, though, isn’t the actual activities. “It’s the people I have met throughout the years,” she says. “It’s making connections, it’s networking, not just for the future but for now, having good friends in different states.”
Kids Leading the Way
Across the country, 4-H has been connecting kids with each other and helping them gain new skills for more than 100 years. The organization says its roots go back even farther, to the late 1800s, when researchers discovered that adult farmers were reluctant to accept new agricultural practices being developed on university campuses. Young people, on the other hand, were open to innovations like soil testing and better seed selection, and parents became believers when the kids’ fields produced better crop yield than theirs did.
In 1902, A.B. Graham started a youth program in Clark County, Ohio, that is considered the birth of 4-H. Similar project-oriented clubs followed, usually with names like Tomato Club, Pig Club, Corn Club or Canning Club. By 1912, the clubs began to be called 4-H clubs, named for the four primary values engaged by members: head, heart, hands and health. In 1914, the Smith-Lever Act formalized the relationship between land-grant universities like Penn State and nearby farmers, establishing the Cooperative Extension System. Extension’s mission included overseeing the boys’ and girls’ clubs involved with agriculture, home economics and related subjects, effectively nationalizing the 4-H organization.
Today, 413 Centre County youth ages five to 18 are involved in 4-H programs including project clubs, which focus on one main project area—such as market swine, rabbits, archery or robotics—and community clubs, whose members choose to work on various projects, such as photography, sewing or fishing. Brittany McFarland, 4-H Extension educator for Centre County, says a large portion of local 4-H members are involved in livestock projects, raising animals to show at the Grange Fair or sell at the market on the last Friday of the fair. Many kids use the money they earn at the market to buy their next animal for the following year’s fair, she says.
Also at the Grange Fair, 4-H members enter their projects in competitions that have their home in the Youth Exhibits Building. Tie-dye shirts are always popular, and other projects on display can include everything from rockets to leather crafts to crocheted items.
“I think the Grange Fair is one of the best traditions that Centre County has for 4-H-ers,” McFarland says. “It’s not just taking your animal to the fair. It’s getting to hang out with your friends in the barn for a whole week.”
On the Farm & Beyond
Originally, 4-H programs were based on traditional farm practices, with boys learning to grow crops or raise livestock and girls focused on home economics activities like baking, sewing and canning. Gender-based divisions have long since disappeared. In addition, project focuses continually evolve to include the latest practices and interests, such as sustainable farming. On the horizon for Centre County youth is a beekeeping curriculum that is awaiting approval, McFarland says.
She notes that kids don’t have to live on a farm to join 4-H, even for animal-related projects.
All 4-H programs include mentoring and career readiness as core elements, according to the national organization. In Centre County, 81 adult volunteers guide youth as they run their clubs by parliamentary procedure, electing officers and making decisions as a group. “Some kids are in three or four clubs to show all their animals,” McFarland says. “They might be treasurer in one club and vice president in another.”
Kids start learning public speaking skills by doing project presentations at club meetings, working up to presenting in front of a larger crowd. “Showing their animals isn’t public speaking, but they learn how to adapt when they’re walking their goat around and the goat is throwing a tantrum,” McFarland says.
Jess Pflugfelder was “heavily involved” in 4-H while growing up in New Jersey despite the fact that she didn’t live on a farm. Her primary club was sewing; she also worked with dairy goats and horses and was a member of Teen Club. “Public speaking was a huge asset to me,” she says. “I learned to organize myself and to give a presentation and not be a deer in the headlights.”
A former 4-H Extension educator for Centre County, Pflugfelder currently leads the Centre County 4-H Teen Council (the new name of the Teen Club). Every local 4-H club can choose to send a member to Teen Council, where the teens learn leadership and other skills, such as impromptu speaking, to take back to their clubs, she explains. Most recently, Teen Council members chose to organize an etiquette dinner, where an outside expert taught them how to pass foods, how to go through a buffet line and other meal-related manners.
A major ongoing Centre County 4-H Teen Council project is the 4-H Interstate Exchange Program, Pflugfelder explains. The teens use a national database to arrange an exchange visit with a Teen Council in another state. This usually happens in a two-year cycle, with the local teens visiting the other state’s group one year, and vice versa the next. Most recently, they’ve partnered with councils in Wyoming, Texas and—this summer—Minnesota.
Jillian participated in the previous exchange in Burleson County, Texas, and visited Waubasha County, Minnesota, this summer with 4-H. “I still talk to the people I met in Texas every day,” she says. “They’re very good friends of mine.”
4-H & STEM
Perhaps the fastest-growing project group locally is Centre County 4-H Robotics. Founded in 2012 with one club for high school students, the program now includes 12 teams totaling about 100 kids in fourth through 12th grades, says Bill Jester, lead robotics volunteer mentor. Members come from school districts across the county and even beyond county lines. Volunteer mentors help the student teams learn how to design, build, program, test and drive sophisticated robots in regional and global competitions managed by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a nonprofit organization not affiliated with 4-H. In 2018, the Centre County team won the global competition, beating teams from around the world.
High school senior Ken Yoshida, a student leader on the high school team, says his team meets a total of 13 hours a week during competition to create the robot that will perform the assigned task. “In January, the organization first announces the game that we have to build our robot around,” he says, noting that this year, the robot had to shoot rings into a basket. “We have six weeks until the first competition. … You start prototyping. You think of ideas. You try building them, and you fix them.”
The kids lead the way, with the help of adult mentors, just as in other 4-H clubs, Yoshida says. “Our team is really student focused,” he says. “We want the students to lead the club and make the decisions.”
Yoshida enjoys collaborating with his friends to achieve the project goal. “It’s pretty intensive. You’re really proud of what you’ve done with everyone,” he says. “I can’t wait to find out next year’s task.”
According to Jester, there’s a “natural fit” between 4-H’s traditional farming focus and the robotics project. “There is a lot of overlap between agriculture and STEM, more so these days— a lot of automation on farms,” he says. “There’s a lot more technology going into farming.”
On Saturday, August 17, Centre County 4-H Robotics will be at the Grange Fair Rec Building from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., offering demonstrations and the opportunity for kids to try out driving the robots. In addition, Robotics members will dump out bins of Legos for free play—always popular with kids who are camping at the fairgrounds.
Lifelong Impact
Kids join 4-H for a variety of reasons—because they’re interested in a particular subject, because an older sibling or a friend is a member or simply because they think it will be fun. Often, though, the long-term result is a stepping stone to a lifelong career, McFarland says. “Whether they go to college or straight into the working world, there are skills that they have learned in 4-H that will be applicable no matter what,” she says.
High school senior Jillian Anderson plans to attend a four-year university and is considering studying animal science or agricultural Extension and education. After years of 4-H involvement, she says, “I can’t imagine not doing something in agriculture for the rest of my life.”
McFarland notes that Centre County 4-H offers $1,000 scholarships toward secondary education for as many as four local high school seniors each year—scholarships that sometimes go unclaimed because not enough teens apply. “There are so many opportunities within the 4-H program,” she says. T&G
Tracey Dooms is editor of Town&Gown.
