As far as Kirk Builta is concerned, agriculture is in good hands in the coming years. He sees it in the caliber of students he gets to interview as part of the Champaign County Farm Bureau Foundation’s scholars program. ¶ In the foundation’s 40 years of existence, it has awarded $1.3 million in scholarship support, and the Bellflower-area native has been a big part of that in the nearly 10 years he has served as executive director. ¶ Builta tackled a few questions from ‘Our Communities’ Editor Dave Hinton about the foundation and its programs.
What is the role of the foundation?
Our mission is to communicate the importance of agriculture to our community. We do that through education. It was founded initially to fund education for the children of farmers. We also have our Ag in the Classroom program. Teachers go into the classroom to teach about food, agriculture and natural resources. I like to say that my role in the foundation is to provide and promote opportunity through agriculture.
This past year, we awarded 42 local students scholarships to go to college in an agricultural area from Black Hawk University to the University of Illinois to Iowa State, Missouri and Murray State. Of course, we’d like them to stay in the area (to attend college), but we know they can always come back.
What is the range of scholarships?
It’s usually $1,000 to $2,000. Back in the day (1986), it started at $500. We’ve got big dreams of doing something much bigger. We do know that even $2,000 doesn’t make a huge dent. The (foundation) board has had that conversation. We also want to help as many students as we can.
Is there a lot of interest?
There is. Of course, we would love to give a scholarship to everyone who applies. We have more applicants than we have scholarship funds. Each year, we’re adding more scholarship funds so we can help more students. This year, we had more students applying than we did last year, which means we’re getting the word out better and the students want to be a part of it. That’s a testament to our high school ag teachers.
What are the eligibility requirements?
You have to be a Champaign County resident or graduate from a high school in Champaign County. And and you need to be a full-time student pursuing a degree in food, ag or natural resources. We have some dietetic students. That’s a big part of agriculture. There’s a lot of careers and a lot of curriculum that touch ag that maybe we didn’t consider 20 years ago as agriculture becomes more technologically heavy.
We’ve got a young lady, and she’s in statistics, Sophia Stierwalt. She wants to use statistics to help farmers at agribusinesses grow their production. She’s been working at Premier Cooperative and has been instrumental for them.
How many students apply?
I’ve spent the last few weeks interviewing 45 kids. There are so many incredible students. The future is bright.
Can you give some details about the interviews?
If you are a first-time applicant, a high school senior or going to college out of town, we will do a Zoom interview for 15 minutes. There’s usually three judges — myself, my scholarship chair and a rotating board member or donor. We just want get to know (the applicant), talk about their passion for agriculture and what they might want to do with their degree.
Our returning students that are local, if you’re a sophomore, junior or senior in college, we’re doing small group lunches. We recently had four students, myself and four of our donors, and we went to lunch. It helps to get to know the student and bring them into the foundation family.
Where does the funding come from?
Our funding for scholarships comes from a couple different sources. First, we have some donors, some families that have endowed scholarships to us. If they’ve made an investment in the foundation, we invest the principal gift, and every year the income from that funds the scholarships. About 30 of the scholarships come from an endowed gift that we have forever. We also have scholarships endowed annually. It might be this year but not next year.
How long is the selection process?
Our applications open Dec. 1, and the deadline is the end of January. It takes about 15 volunteers to either read all the applications and judge them or participate in the interview process. We try to do that between Feb. 1 and the middle of March. Our goal at our mid-March board meeting is to approve who is selected. They should know around April 1. That money will be sent to the schools this fall.
What kind of questions do you ask?
Just about the experience they already have had and the things they want to do. Often, they’ve got mission trips and church and sports already on their resume. I like to get our donors involved in the process. Our young generation sometimes gets a stereotype, but if you meet them in person and you hear what they want to do, it can change your perspective.
How has the process changed in the years you’ve been involved?
Compared to what I was looking at in college, agriculture has become much more global. These students are thinking about global issues. We have one young lady thinking about hunger in North Africa. How does a young woman from Mahomet have that on her radar?
We’ve interviewed three students this week who want to go to law school and want to protect the family farm, either from generation to generation or from overregulation. The number who want to start their own business shocked me — the students who want to be in charge of their own destinies. There’s definitely opportunities for that.
Many of them might not even be from farm families, but Grandma and Grandpa might have been farmers.
How has the farm bureau been involved in education?
Ag in the Classroom in Champaign County was originally started as Earth Partners. I believe that started around 1993-94. For 30 years, we’ve been going into classrooms and teaching students where their food comes from, what our farmers are doing every day in their farm fields and their barn lots, and doing it in a truthful way and a modern way.
We are in every school district in Champaign County, mostly elementary schools. We’re in a couple intermediate or junior high schools. We have two teachers on our staff. Their full-time job is to go into the classroom and provide a 30-minute lesson. This month, our lesson has been on eggs. We didn’t plan this with the egg prices. We’ll have incubators for our classrooms, and they’ll hatch chickens. We talk about reproduction, the parts of an egg and more.
Every lesson that we do will meet the state learning standards in various subjects. They’re doing it with their own hands, and there’s a piece they can take home to parents and continue with that. We provide that free to the schools. If you donate to the foundation, the other pool of funding goes to teaching.
I would like us to hand off from Ag in the Classroom to an ag teacher in the high school who will continue to stoke their interests in high school, then have them get a scholarship and keep them local.
I’d invite folks to get involved with us, whether that’s meeting and mentoring students or getting involved Ag in the Classroom.
