Hands-On Learning
AgTrust supports community garden project that teaches ag students important life skills.
Students can expect to get their hands dirty when they enroll in Tracy Denny’s agriculture courses at Detroit High School in northeast Texas. The school built its own greenhouse in 2017 to serve as a lab for ag students and FFA members.
Now ag students have yet another hands-on learning experience. This past summer, the school officially opened the Detroit Community Garden and Education Center, with a little help from AgTrust Farm Credit.
Designed to be a community service project and a classroom, the garden is run by the ag students, who also raised funds to help build it. Food grown will be donated to Detroit area residents.
“The garden will be used to help the community, and it can be used by any teacher at Detroit ISD as an outdoor classroom from pre-K through 12th grade,” Denny says.
Selling pants, donating food
Five years ago, students started growing plants in the school greenhouse and selling them in the spring to
help fund the ag program. Last spring, Denny’s 83 ag students sold about 1,000 hanging baskets and 1,000 vegetable plants and herbs. That’s not all. They also planted more than 3,000 seeds in six-pack containers to give to local citizens and students who wanted to start their own gardens. Every family who attended the official opening of the community garden in May received a free flat of 36 vegetable plants.
“We wanted a way to give back, because the community supports us so much through our plant sale,” Denny says. “We’re very blessed that several people in the community, including AgTrust Farm Credit, saw the support we needed for this project, and jumped in to help us.”
A longtime FFA advisor, agriculture teacher and farmer herself, Denny acknowledges that the greatest benefits will go to the students.
Learning life skills
“We know not every kid’s going to go to college,” she says. “But whether a student wants to study landscaping or horticulture or go into the workforce after school, this program will teach them important life skills.”
Those skills include bookkeeping, gardening and plant care, soil science, tool safety, basic construction skills and teamwork.
AgTrust Farm Credit sponsored the container beds for the community garden in 2021 and donated signage in 2022.
Supporting a worthy project
At AgTrust, we knew right away this was a project we needed to support,” says Barbara Golden, Paris Credit Office President for AgTrust Farm Credit. “The community garden ties directly to what we do — helping to feed people. But more importantly, there are many students who do not have the opportunity to learn about gardening. This program can teach them how to grow their own food. It might even expose them to new job opportunities they’d never considered before.”
Grants from the Bayer Fund and National FFA covered initial construction and startup costs. 
“Mrs. Golden saw a need to help when the grant money ran out, and she immediately helped us,” Denny says. “This garden has not cost our school or community any money — it was all from grants, donations and money raised by my students through their greenhouse class.”