Agriculture trailblazer inspires next generation
At first, Waylon didn’t look like much.
He was one of about a dozen Suffolk lambs purchased by a Bellaire High School agriculture teacher in 1995 and was randomly assigned to Andra Collins-Johnson when she was a restless junior. A career in animal husbandry or otherwise working in agriculture had never crossed her mind, and it seemed like a foreign concept for her in Third Ward.
Raising Waylon and spending long hours at Bellaire’s barn, however, awoke something in the now 40-year-old.
“The thing that stood out most to me is that I felt peace,” Collins-Johnson said. “There was a lot of space and pasture at the barn, even though there were freeways around it. I would stand out there and just look — I would look and think about what to do with the rest of my life. It gave me structure and
made me feel safe.”
Collins-Johnson now teaches agriculture science to teens and advises a Future Farmers of America chapter at Aldine ISD’s Benjamin O. Davis High School, showing students that despite living in the middle of Houston’s urban sprawl, their horizons stretch far beyond the concrete that surrounds them.
Fifteen years after CollinsJohnson became the first Black woman to teach ag science in Texas at the high school level, few students of color participate in agriculture education in the Lone Star State and across the country. Nationally, only about 5.3 percent of students who were part of Future Farmers of America last school year were Black and about 15.2 percent were Hispanic, compared with about 64.3 percent of members who were white.
Out of more than 136,000 student members in Texas, about 5.7 percent are Black, nearly 30 percent are Hispanic and more than 52 percent are white. Only about 11 percent of them live in cities.
Agriculture may seem like an unusual curriculum option in Houston, the fourth largest city in the country better known for its oil and gas production than for pastures and livestock. And yet, there are more than 100 FFA chapters within a 50-mile radius of downtown, with at least 19 inside Beltway 8.
Aaron Alejandro, executive director of the Texas Future Farmers of America Foundation, said Harris County has more agriculture science teachers, students and FFA programs than about 25 percent of the United States combined, giving “food a seat at the table” here.
He credits that to work the organization has done over the past 20 years to reach more students of color and students who live in urban environments. The organization split its curriculum into semesterlong classes instead of yearlong general vocation classes, allowing students to dip a toe into the field with such courses as floral arranging, small animal care and plant science.
It also has partnered with Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources and Related Sciences — or MANRRS — and the Latinos in Agriculture Leadership Conference. Some programs allow students to take care of a rescue animal for a year rather than buying and raising hogs or steer for auction, and one program in San Antonio gives students credit for raising fish.
Those efforts have made some progress, Alejandro said, evidenced by Houston’s prevalence of agriculture course offerings and FFA programs. Still, he said it remains hard to pull new students in without help from local schools or their families.
“What a high school counselor directs a student or parent directs a student to do falls outside our reach,” Alejandro said. “Our job is to make sure to make the program as attractive as we can to get people there. Then we can provide them with the most extraordinary experience they can ever have.”
A different path
It was a guidance counselor who suggested Collins-Johnson take an agriculture science class at Bellaire High School. She was struggling to keep her grades up and find something that kept her focus, so the counselor suggested it as a left-field option. No one in her family had experience with livestock or growing food, although Collins-Johnson had spent her childhood growing beans from the pantry into sprouts under her bed and watching National Geographic shows on Saturday mornings. It was a strange adjustment. Black friends would call her “Yee-Haw” when she would show up to school wearing cowboy boots and Rocky Mountain jeans, and she was the only Black student in her ag class.
Her mother lent her $200 to buy Waylon the lamb, but when he got a deep scrape that needed to be stitched up, she had to load him in the back of her friend’s 1970 Cadillac and drive through southwest Houston — with Waylon’s head out the window — to the closest vet. She learned how to speak in front of audiences and the basics of running a small business through FFA, which she says showed her “I can play a role in society.”
It was the first time CollinsJohnson felt passion about her school work. It also felt like a turning point after all she had endured, including the death of her father when she was in 10th grade.
“The barn was a place of solace, and then I became third-degree family with FFA,” CollinsJohnson said. “I had escaped a domestic violence situation growing up, so when I got into agriculture, it really saved my life.”
Within months of her graduation from Prairie View A&M University, she had an opportunity to pass that on. A teacher she had known through Houston FFA activities approached her as she was working at an extension farm in Rosenberg and asked if she had ever considered going into agriculture education.
“She said, ‘If you do, you’ll be the first Black woman to teach agriculture in the state of Texas,’ ” she said.
She enrolled at Sam Houston State University to earn a master’s degree in agriculture education and made state history in 2005 when she started as an agriculture science teacher at Fort Bend ISD’s Thurgood Marshall High School.
An encouraging presence
Even though some of Charle Tolar’s family members have raised chickens and hogs, she nearly threw up while dissecting a cat in “Mrs. C-J’s” class as a sophomore. She thought the class would just watch videos of animal autopsies, not actually perform them.
Now a senior and vice president of Benjamin O. Davis High School’s FFA chapter, Tolar said she has gotten used to it, thanks to Collins-Johnson’s encouragement and the energy she exudes during classes. It is not uncommon to hear music wafting from her classroom down the hall during class changes, while CollinsJohnson sings and dances along. She cracks jokes to lighten the mood when students get stressed with new concepts and experiences, and she exudes enthusiasm when she talks about animals.
“Even on test days, when you walk in and go, ‘Oh my God, we have a test,’ she says, ‘You’ve got this, you’ve got this. We’ve been studying. I texted you to remind you. You’ve got your flash cards, you’re going to do fine,’ ” Tolar said.
Collins-Johnson does not gloss over harsher realities either, said Daniela Sanchez, who is completing her first year of veterinarian school at Purdue University. Like Collins-Johnson, Sanchez had no plans to pursue anything animal related after high school when she enrolled in an animal sciences class with a friend as a freshman at Davis.
“At first I thought she was a little harsh, I thought being a little hard on everybody,” Sanchez said. “But it wasn’t until now that I appreciated how hard she was on everybody. She was really encouraging but really realistic. She never sugar-coated anything, and she really made every lesson applicable to life in general.”
Collins-Johnson ended up being a confidant to Sanchez, who would talk about her dreams and struggles in life and in school.
Her time in her class impacted her so much that Sanchez decided to attend Collins-Johnson’s alma mater, Prairie View A&M, after graduation and plans to be a small-animal vet when she completes veterinary school at Purdue.
Collins-Johnson similarly has inspired Tolar’s post-graduate plans, the teen said. Instead of going into agriculture, though, Tolar wants to be a teacher.
“Being an African American, and an African-American female, it’s showing me we’re capable of pursing big careers,” Tolar said. “She shows that we’re able to accomplish much more than we expect — much more than others expect of us.”
Next on Collins-Johnson’s list of students to inspire: her 13-yearold son Jeremiah, who will be a freshman next year. They are not raising any livestock at their home on the semirural outskirts of Cypress — just their schnauzer, Chase — but she hopes Jeremiah will opt to raise a pig next year and take an ag science class. Until then, she is just happy to be among the voices pushing for more students to have exposure to agriculture.
“It’s never been of importance to me to be the first or to get recognition,” Collins-Johnson said. “What is important is that there are other people who have the idea that agriculture should be taught to all kids, no matter how much money their parents make or where they live or what they look like.”