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Future Food Education Grant Application

Please find enclosed our proposal in application for a $10,000.00 Future Food Education Grant. At Ragged Ridge School, our mission is to prepare our students to live in harmony with other people as well as with the environment. While we give our 520 students grades 7-12 a well-rounded education, we place special emphasis on examination of how the world works scientifically and economically. We pride ourselves on raising future leaders in the fields of science and business.

With this mission in mind, we’re sure you will agree that funding our school project to raise and sell organic chickens and eggs matches your organization’s goals of helping a broad audience understand agricultural practices. We’ve tried to provide all the information you may need in this proposal, but we would be happy to answer any further questions you may have. We look forward to hearing from you soon and to beginning our exciting new agriculture project at Ragged Ridge School this coming spring. Ragged Ridge School is applying for a $10,000 Future Food Education Grant.

Your grant will enable us to create both an educational experience for our students as well as a sustainable source of income for our school. Ragged Ridge School plans to achieve the following goals with our poultry project. Teach Our Students About Raising Food Animals Many youngsters these days believe that meat and eggs come from grocery stores.

We want to educate them about the entire process of raising animals and delivering food to the consumer’s table. Teach Our Students Responsibility to Other Living Creatures Making our students responsible for the care of our chickens will teach them compassion and respect for other living creatures. Teach Our Students the Business Side of Agriculture We will not only raise chickens and gather eggs, but we will sell poultry and eggs to the public. Our students will learn how to budget for expenses, how to advertise and sell products, and how to balance the books for a small business enterprise.

Teach Our Students Organic Farming Practices Our poultry project will be an organic farming project. This means our students will have to learn how to meet organic standards, as well as learning how different farming methods can affect our environment. Raise Money for Charity or for Special School Projects After our poultry project has earned its first profits, we plan to hold a referendum and let students decide how to use those profits. Options could be for other special projects to be accomplished within the school, or to donate profits to a worthy cause, such as supporting a sister school in Africa, Asia, or Latin America.

As you can see from the list above, our goals for the poultry project are 100% aimed toward educating and benefiting our students. Although we want our students to run our poultry project, of course they will need to be taught what to do, and the project will need to be closely supervised to be sure both students and animals fare well and that the project achieves its goals. Please see the Education page for details about what and how we plan to teach our student volunteers. To ensure proper supervision of the project, we plan to do the following.

Appoint a committee of three faculty supervisors each quarter to oversee the project. This will be a rotating duty overseen by the school principal. We hope that faculty members will volunteer for this interesting duty, but the principal is prepared to appoint members if needed. The first quarter will be the most time-consuming, as we will all be learning how to run a poultry business, and one of the duties of the first committee will be to create an instruction booklet for all following committees.

Check the poultry area at least two times per day. A faculty supervisor will check the poultry area at least twice a day to be sure that students are carrying out tasks as expected. Hold weekly meetings during the quarter with team members.

A faculty supervisor will hold a weekly meeting with the student team members to make sure everything is going smoothly and resolve any problems. Provide status reports to the principal on the project. Each month the supervisory committee will report on the status and successes or failures of our poultry project. Ragged Ridge School has already done preliminary community outreach to ensure the support of our neighbors for our poultry project.

Goals

We had two goals in mind when reaching out to our neighbors. Inform them that we may be keeping hens no roosters at Ragged Ridge School. This was especially important for our closest neighbors, as they may hear clucking and other normal chicken sounds. Gather the names of any neighbors who are interested in purchasing fresh organic chicken and or eggs from our project.

Outreach Efforts

We sent 247 letters to all neighbors who live within a five-mile radius of our school. We received 189 replies via email and regular mail. These consisted of 185 expressions of support, 6 expressions of concerns 3 about the potential to spread viruses, 1 about possible attraction of predators like coyotes, 2 vegetarian issues , and 139 potential customers who were interested in purchasing eggs when they became available. We responded to those who expressed concerns and created a mailing list of those who were interested in our products.

Benefits

By contacting neighbors in advance of the project, we ensured that we have enlisted community support and that we have a customer base for future sales. Although we plan to educate all students about our poultry project and use examples from our project whenever feasible to demonstrate scientific, math, or economic principles, every student at Ragged Ridge cannot participate in the daily tasks of our poultry project. This means that we must have a method of selecting students for participation. We anticipate great demand for participation among students.

Therefore, we propose to select 30 students each quarter to care for our chickens and collect eggs and actively sell our products. We will develop a list of job titles and descriptions, and select one student to fill each slot at the beginning of every quarter, based on the following criteria. Desire to Participate The student must apply for a particular position in writing, stating why he or she is qualified to do that job and what he or she expects to gain from the experience.

Availability Dependability Different jobs within the project will demand specific time commitments. Applicants must be available to carry out the tasks when needed. Overall Academic Record Applicants must have demonstrated their ability to carry out their normal school activities and assignments with satisfactory grades.

We don’t want academic studies to suffer as a result of taking on extra tasks in our poultry project. Random Drawing Names of qualified applicants will be placed into a pool at the beginning of each quarter, and one name will be drawn at random to fill each of the 30 positions. We anticipate having an enthusiastic group of participants of varying ages and dispositions each quarter.

Students will learn to work together to make decisions and maintain schedules. We anticipate the following costs for the project for our first year. Note that all costs are estimated and will change somewhat due to changing prices and start time for the project.

As you can see, we project that our costs will come in at slightly less funding needed than the $10,000 grant, but these are all estimated costs. Depending on weather and health of our chicks, we may need to pay for extra heat or cooling or replacement animals. During the last half of the first year, we hope to be bringing in money from egg sales.

We envision our poultry project as a real-world learning experience for our students, as well as a money-making venture. Here’s a brief summary of how we will use our plan to raise chickens and sell eggs for education purposes. Biology We will use our chickens as examples when examining the topics of genetics, digestion, biochemistry, anatomy, and reproduction. Ecology Environment We will use our poultry project as an example to study the issues of food supply, species survival, pollution, and sustainability.

Business To organize and run our poultry project and egg-selling business, we must teach the business principles of supply and demand, profit and loss, marketing, advertising, planning, scheduling, and general accounting and reporting practices. At Ragged Ridge School, we pride ourselves on raising future leaders in science and business. This project will promote both fields and give students practical experience that will benefit them in the future. Ragged Ridge School is a private middle and high school focused on science, economics, and global awareness.

Our campus sprawls across 25 acres outside of Claremont, New Hampshire. Ragged Ridge School was first established in 1972 as a small college preparatory academy for 270 international students, mostly the children of diplomats serving at the United Nations, with an emphasis on international history, politics, and languages. In 1995, the school expanded its facilities and its mission to include 520 students of various economic and social classes, and broadened its focus to emphasize science and economics as well as international issues.

Any student in grades 7-12 is welcome to apply to attend Ragged Ridge School. Our student selections are made based on academic goals, previous performance, and our interest in maintaining a diverse student population. Our students range in age from 12-19, and originate from across the United States as well as from many foreign countries.

Forty percent of our students attend on scholarship. The project has been designed to be sustainable beyond the initial funding period. Although we do not plan to keep roosters because of their combative dispositions as well as their crowing and potential noise complaints from neighbors, we plan to borrow a rooster from time to time to create new chicks and replenish our flock as older hens stop laying eggs and are sold. Surplus rooster chicks will also be sold.

Assuming that our organic egg business is as successful as we predict it will be, our poultry and egg project will continue for as long as the school wishes to participate. We hope this project will contribute substantial funding for other school projects or for charitable donations. Our school has the real estate available to enlarge the initial poultry project, or to plant food crops and raise other types of livestock to further our investment in agricultural studies.

Our plan for sustainability fits in perfectly with the mission of the Future Foods Center. Following are the steps we envision for our poultry project. Note that students will participate in each step.

Design our poultry area. After studying typical designs and guidelines for chicken coops and outdoor chicken enclosures, a committee of students and teachers will create a blueprint, calculate materials needed, order supplies and gather tools, and schedule all the work necessary to construct a chicken coop, enclosure, and associated processing and storage areas. Construct our poultry area. After having an expert check our plans and make any needed revisions, students, teachers, and volunteers will build our chicken coop, enclosure, and other structures.

If we lack a volunteer with sufficient construction experience, we may need to hire a qualified carpenter to help oversee this step of the project, which could take several days or weeks, depending on weather and availability of personnel involved. Acquire 50 hen chicks of varying breeds as well as all needed supplies. We plan to do research on breeds of chickens and purchase chicks from 3-4 breeds known for their egg laying and other market qualities.

At this time we will naturally also purchase the chicken feed and other supplies we need to get started. Raise chicks to laying age. According to our research, chicks are generally considered delicate up to 6-7 weeks of age, and should be kept indoors or in a protected, temperature-regulated environment.

Hens begin laying eggs at 18-22 weeks. Students will feed and water chickens every day, as well as keeping the enclosure clean and keeping notes on progress of growth and general health. During this time period, we will also plan our egg collection schedule and our packaging, sales, and distribution strategies. Collect, package, and sell eggs, and butcher and sell chickens.

After egg-laying begins, we will put into practice our strategies for collecting and selling our eggs. When hens fail to lay eggs, we may decide to butcher and sell them. Develop our business strategies and methodology and make changes as needed.

Students will track sales and expenses, keep the accounts current, and propose and develop marketing strategies for our poultry and egg business. Determine how to spend our profits. When we have reached profitability, our student body will help us determine how to spend our profits, choosing between using monies for special educational projects at Ragged Ridge School or making donations to charity. As you can see, we intend for our poultry project to be an ongoing educational opportunity for our students to learn agriculture and business practices.