RAYLAND, Ohio – Project Green Growth Gateway: Cultivating Futures at Buckeye Local Schools is the 2025 recipient of the Youth Pathways for Careers in Agriculture Grant from the Ohio Farm Bureau Foundation. A total of $25,000 will be awarded to assist Buckeye Local School District in developing programming that will introduce and prepare students for careers within Ohio’s agriculture sector.

The project’s centerpiece is a greenhouse designed by students in partnership with local groups, like Jefferson County Farm Bureau and local businesses, to support a wide range of educational activities and accommodate year-round learning for various class sizes in eastern Ohio. Buckeye Local High School Ag Instructor Cameron Best will oversee the project.

“The project is built around designing and constructing a greenhouse outside of ‌the high school,” Best said.

The greenhouse will support and help build Buckeye Local’s first-year agriculture program, which began in the fall of 2024. “We have about 22 kids in the program right now,” Best said. “But we plan to grow that exponentially here in the next couple of years, and we feel that this greenhouse is going to be a key factor in growing our program.”

The Green Growth Gateway project hopes to engage many Buckeye Local students, not just those in ag classes. “The greenhouse is actually going to be useful for the ag classes, common core classes, and we have a really solid foods program here. We feel that the greenhouse is going be the key to getting more students involved in our new programs and keeping them involved in their current programs,” Best said.

Best sees several other ways the greenhouse will be used. “It’s going to be used for a wide variety of reasons – whether it be fundraising, growing mums for Mother’s Day, growing produce for our foods program, and introducing that into the curriculum for the classes that I teach,” he said.

Since the program is in its infancy, Best only teaches four classes this year with the hope of adding more in the future. “We do have a lot of interest for next year because we just started scheduling within our high school for the 2025-2026 school year,” he said. “I got hired in May, so the kids were already basically out of school, and they weren’t sure ‌what to expect. I didn’t get to talk to them before school let out for the summer.”

As a lifelong member of the community, Best graduated from Buckeye Local. “I grew up about 5 miles away from the school – born and raised in the county and the school district.” And he’s still involved in farming as well. “I run a club calf operation called CB Show Cattle – I dabble in a little bit of embryo transfer and artificial insemination,” he said.

When groups apply for a Youth Pathways Grant from the Ohio Farm Bureau Foundation, the organization looks for partnerships, innovation, sustainability and community connection.

“Organizations sign up for what we call a pitch session, where they come into our offices and they pitch their idea,” said Kelly Burns, executive director of the Ohio Farm Bureau Foundation. “They have 10 minutes in front of our grants committee, and they pitch their idea, and we give direction back to them.”

The foundation supports programs that create pathways for agriculture career exploration and training. Other grant eligibility requirements include 501c3 status, partnerships with at least one local county farm bureau, and some type of educational entity.

“We want to be partners with some sort of K-12 district, a regional area ESC, or a vocational/technical school – we see a lot of folks partnering in those ways,” Burns said.

Following the pitch session, applicants are connected to their local county farm bureau and other organizations in their area. They have about three-four weeks to revamp their plan and submit their formal application. “It’s a long process,” Burns said. “It’s a couple of months, and we do like to help.”

Buckeye Local Superintendent Coy Sudvary was made aware of the grant through a friend, Dustin Pyles, CEO and managing consultant at VAZA Consulting.

Sudvary presented the grant opportunity to Best. “He said, ‘do you think this is something that you’d be interested in applying for?’ And I was like, ‘most definitely,’” Best said. Pyles, Sudvary, and Best worked together to secure the grant.

This was the only grant the foundation gave out this year, it was a growth grant. “That’s what Cameron Best got,” Burns said. “At that level of grant, we’re just trying to amplify the work to build out a program.

“We also look for programs that can be sustainable. Can this program be replicated at another school, in another community, in another county, is this something that through their work, they’re able to sustain? Because the one thing we don’t want is folks relying on this grant year after year.”