Back in my early days in Junior High School, Mr. Ransom was an teacher of the agricultural sciences and also of shop classes. He was also the informal head of the FFA or Future Farmers of America, a major institution in my small rural high school.

I never liked the man and I don’t think he particularly liked me. I viewed him as being very conservative, very old fashion, and very anti-environment. He also didn’t defend me when other kids picked on me for being different. I was into technology and being green, he was into farming and getting things done the old fashion way. It was a series of personalities bound to clash.

Mr. Ransom had his favorites in his classes, namely those farm families he had a long history with and those students who had long be very active in the FFA. I was neither of them, my family still relatively new to the region, despite having lived – at that time – 15 years on a 7-acre small plot of land in Westerlo.

My parents farmed, but in a small scale. We had goats, chickens, and raised all kinds of things in our garden. But we were never real farmers, we didn’t dairy much less raise beef, hay, or other crops. Those people had in on FFA, and I was an outsider. I was never in the FFA nor could I have easily fit into aggie click at school. I had friends that went to cattle auctions and spent their summers bailing hay, but that never was me.

It wasn’t as though I didn’t like the farmers or that I wasn’t friends with them. Indeed, some of my closest friends through High School where very much farmers, and had home movies of baby Herefords born on Christmas curled up next to the wood stove trying to keep warm. Others friends where very big into the FFA and many activities they did, but I could never get involved with Mr. Ransom standing in my way.

I really do not know why I disliked Mr. Ransom so much. He was a farmer, and he took care of his land, and had a respect for many of the traditions that keep our working landscape alive and healthy. He probably knew far more about the environment then I knew at that point, and teaching how to take care of it and making a profit from it was core to his job as a teacher of the agricultural sciences.

I don’t dispute he was a conservative Republican or that he was buddies to many of the bad old boys of the farming community. But that doesn’t take way from the work he did educating my generation of students, and many previous ones on the benefits to a healthy farming economy. Regardless of his outward political ideology, he stood for remembering and embracing our land for it’s most basic traits.

More then a decade after taking a class with Mr. Ransom and more six years after graduating from High School, I wish I hadn’t be so hostile to him and his ideas. I really could have used some of those skills taught in FFA, and been better off if I had networked more with the farming community of my High school. Those experiences not only would have taught me invaluable lessons about farming, but gave me deep connections to a long-standing families who are tasked with taking care of our land.