Shelly Budziszewski: Growing the Next Generation of Agriculture

A sign on the wall of Shelly Budziszewski's classroom reads, "No farms, no food." It is a plain statement, but for the fourth-grade teacher at Royalton-Hartland Central School District, it captures something she thinks about constantly. Each year her students arrive a little further removed from the family farm than the last, and many have never stopped to consider how the food on their plate got there. Shelly has spent her career helping them make that connection.

She grew up in this district, and her own path into agriculture ran through her family. When she was a student at Royalton-Hartland, agriculture carried little pride. She remembers classmates who could not wait to leave the small town, sure there was nothing to do and no work to be found. When she returned years later as a teacher, she found the FFA program had been restarted, and she was glad to see a new generation of students taking pride in their community and its farms.

The shift in her own teaching began with an invitation. Asked to join a farm-to-school team, Shelly attended the Farm to School Institute and started learning how agriculture could live in the classroom and the cafeteria. She found that agriculture fit into the school day more naturally than she had expected.

In Shelly's fourth-grade classroom, agriculture runs through nearly every subject. Her students work through programs like AgBadging and Discover Dairy and take part in weekly food education lessons that build the vocabulary and scientific footing they will carry into later grades. She also helped found the Green Team, a student-led club that now stretches across the elementary and middle schools. Its members tend school gardens, run composting systems, and raise food in indoor grow towers. Field trips take them onto working farms, where the lessons come to life.

One of those farms is McCollum Farms, which opens its barn doors to visiting students. Kevin Youngers, the farm's manager and herdsman, sees the visits as planting a seed for the future, a chance for kids to understand what agriculture involves before the food ever reaches a shelf. Jessica McCollum, a herdsman at the farm that carries her family's name, watches students arrive amazed at how much milk a single cow gives. Most of them have only ever seen milk in a grocery store and have never thought about where it started. By the time they leave, some have fed a calf or watched one being born.

Much of Shelly's approach comes down to letting kids be kids. She wants them to touch things, to smell things, to get messy, and she stays comfortable when a lesson turns a little chaotic. "It's okay to measure something incorrectly. It's okay to spill something," she says. A child who makes a mistake and fixes it is rehearsing something they will need as an adult, and those hands-on moments tend to be the ones students remember.

Her larger goal reaches past the farm itself. Shelly does not expect every student to become a dairy farmer, and she makes a point of telling parents so. What she wants is for kids to see how much of the working world connects back to agriculture. "We're trying to get the kids to grow up to be creative problem solvers, to be innovators," she says, the people who will one day carry the industry forward. On the farm, Jessica makes the same case. A kid who loves trucks might one day haul the milk. One who likes to build might engineer the barn or design the next facility. Farming, she points out, creates far more jobs than the ones that happen in the barn.

That shared conviction has not gone unnoticed. In 2026, New York Agriculture in the Classroom named Shelly and her colleague Susan McLaughlin its Teachers of the Year for the K-6 program the two of them built together. The honor did not stop at the state line. After a rigorous application, the pair earned a national award from the National Agriculture in the Classroom Organization and an invitation to be recognized onstage in front of more than 600 educators at the national conference in Providence, Rhode Island. 

What links a fourth-grade classroom to a milking parlor is a shared belief that the next generation has to understand where its food comes from. Kevin puts it simply. The children are the future, he says, and that future has to be tended if it is going to continue and prosper. Shelly, Kevin, and Jessica are teaching that lesson from two sides of the same story, one in the classroom and one in the barn. Together, they are New York Dairy.

Watch our spotlight video on Shelly Budziszewski here: https://youtu.be/YUJdZ3uo6CI