By Esther Quintanilla
Inside Jason Ferreira’s honors agriculture science class at Hanford High School, students are dreaming up big goals for the year – showing animals at the county fair, volunteering on FFA judging teams, and working on their own projects.
But they started the year small. For the first week of school, Ferreira and his students restored their on-campus farm to build a monarch butterfly sanctuary. They planted native plants – such as milkweed and verbena – to attract the fluttering insects as they make their way to the Valley in the fall.
With those projects, students learned the importance of irrigation, data collection and analysis.
“It will help them to see if there’s trends that are happening with the butterfly populations,” Ferreira said. “Like the number of butterflies, the eggs, the caterpillars, the time of year it’s all happening.”
The exercise was a taste of what students could be doing later in the world of agricultural science with the help of artificial intelligence tools.
Such student projects are gaining in importance because the agriculture industry is rapidly adopting automation and new technologies.
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