Students at Leilehua High School will soon be partnering with Leeward Community College's newly opened Wahiawa Value-Added Product Development Center to make products using ingredients from their campus farm.
When the center held its grand opening on Friday, April 12, Jackie Freitas, who teaches the high school's natural resources and agriculture classes, was among the many attendees.
"They will learn how to be entrepreneurs," she told Pacific Business News by phone a few days after the event. "They will learn the whole process of growing a crop and making it more than just soybeans."
Freitas runs a 3.5-acre "land lab" on campus that includes traditional and organic farming, floriculture, an 80-foot hydroponic greenhouse, animal husbandry — including a mule, turkeys, pigs, chickens, ducks, bees and more — and a shop for welding, Freitas said. She is also the high school's advisor for Future Farmers of America. The high school agriculture program's motto is: "You need it, you make it. You break it, you fix it," she said.
In November, Freitas was named the 2024 Teacher of the Year by the Hawaii Department of Education.
Freitas, a Leilehua graduate, participated in the agriculture program when she was a student and learned how to slaughter chickens, create an imu and grow plants, she said.
Today, alumni of her classes are working as marine biologists, veterinarians, employees of the state department of agriculture, and are in the process of becoming agriculture teachers themselves, she said.
Freitas shared how her students use technology to farm, as well as plans to work with the Wahiawa Value-Added Product Development Center to develop locally made products with campus ingredients.
Can you talk about how students will work with the newly opened Wahiawa Value-Added Product Development Center? Our goal is to grow a crop here and take it down to the value-added center to make a value-added product. One that they've always been talking about — and I'm discovering and learning about — would be tofu. So, we would grow the soy. Then take it up to the value-added center to process it to make tofu and then package. That would be one [product], and then they also want to do something with our bees.
Can you talk about how students are using technology as part of your classes? Right now, we have a very big push for ag tech. So we have our FarmBots, which is a wooden box [with] a gantry [or robot arm] that the students use to code, and the gantry then goes ahead and takes the code that the students put in and it plants, waters, weeds inside of a box. ... We have our hydroponic system, which we've been doing for many years, and it's been a really good production. The hydroponic greenhouse, we actually just got USDA GAP [United States Department of Agriculture Good Agricultural Practices] certified, so everything from that greenhouse would be able to be sold in the cafeteria.
What else do you want readers to know? I would say a lot of people think the ag industry is an industry that is ... for the old timers; it's not for our youth. But since I've been here for the past 14 years, the number of students who have taken my program or have grown interested in this program has quite expanded [and it's now] a two-teacher program. The interest is there, in ag. ... We just have to be able to understand that kids now [want to] use technology in ag. I am still very traditional. I like things growing in the ground, getting dirty, but we have to be open minded to how things are grown, how things are made and understand that technology is here to help us, and it will help us in the long run.
