Tanque Verde High School teacher innovates the school's agriculture program

TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — Tanque Verde High School’s agriculture program has turned into an outdoor classroom creating a hands-on learning experience for students.

They plan on raising cattle, and later getting the meat USDA stamped to sell.

New to the school, Craig Bal is the Agriscience and Precision Manufacturing teacher. He hopes to introduce new career ideas to the kids.

The barn is the new addition to the school. Mr. Bal has plans to add chicken coops, picnic tables, and stalls for more animals.

Whether it’s roping, welding, or livestock evaluation, you’ll learn something new in Mr. Bal’s classroom, or should I say, “out” of Mr. Bal’s classroom.

“We built a barn, land lab facility, all the corrals, the horse-riding arena or squeeze chute,” said Bal.

“On the front side is the outdoor classroom, so we do have a projector and a you know, a projector screen so I will have PowerPoints up, but we'll talk about animal parts. Then we walk over and we go to the animal parts, okay, there's the brisket, there's the hindquarters, there's the flank…” said Bal.

The high school students built the barn from the ground up.

“That was pouring of concrete that finished three weeks ago and the barn came the next day, and the kids built it in two and a half weeks,” said Bal.

“We've gone over saddling and shoeing. So, we learned how farriers put shoes on horses and the different tools that they use,” said Tanque Verde High School Student, Malina Travis.

Mr. Bal hopes to get students out of their comfort zone and encourages them to try new things.

“I just learned how to weld when everyone else started welding, but I practice like during lunch after school, so I kind of learned how to do it pretty quick,” said student, Michael Mckenna.

Whether it’s in the greenhouse or by the cattle, every student is going to leave Mr. Bal’s class with a new skill.

“We are producing the next engineers, the next food safety scientist, we're producing next leaders of the free world-- but we're also feeding the world at the same time,” said Bal.