Boeck's tree has many limbs

CENTRAL LEE – Central Lee’s perennial ag instructor Tom Boeck is working through his final year as a full-time teacher and FFA sponsor. But his legacy will last for generations to come.
The next in the series of articles for Lee County Farm Bureau is taking a deeper look at agriculture in the county, and focuses on the instructional tree that has blossomed under Boeck’s four decades at the Donnellson high school.
One doesn’t need to look very far to see the impact Boeck has left on agriculture education in southeast Iowa and beyond.
Maddie Wellman, a former Central Lee student, will be taking over Boeck’s leadership with the Future Farmers of America organization he has built with the Hawks. That program is considered one of the pinnacle high school programs in the state.
Since being hired in 1985 at Central Lee, not really knowing if he wanted to teach or not, Boeck has crafted a legacy that is unmatched.
Keokuk’s new ag instructor and FFA sponsor Brady Martin is a former Boeck student, as is Fort Madison’s FFA sponsor and agriculture instructor David Vance. He also has former students running programs at Holy Trinity Catholic, Mt. Pleasant, and Mediapolis.
And those are just some of the students, not to include student teachers who have been part of Boeck’s mentorship.
“I’ve probably had 20 student teachers over the years and they were students in Missouri and Illinois. I’ve worked with Western Illinois on student teaching programs,” he said. “Other teachers recommend this teaching station as a place to look to. And I think that’s because we do have a lot to offer kids. We're a two-person department, we have a greenhouse, we have a land lab, we have extra shop spaces, we have ag mechanics, just a wide array of agricultural curriculum where kids can find their passion.”
He said his original plans were to only teach for a few years and then go back to the family farm in Denison, Iowa, where he grew up.
“But I was just drawn to this place. There are a lot of good people in a very supportive community. At that time, things were very production-oriented. A lot of the kids had pigs and cattle and crops and all that but this has evolved into work-based learning type projects and agriculture greenhouses and landscaping - a lot of those types of things.”
His modest approach to all things learning was quickly noticed by other education leaders around the state.
“Probably 8 to 10 years into the teaching, I think people at the state realized we had a pretty solid program here,” Boeck said.
“I was of the belief that if I did a good job in the classroom, and the shop area, and the greenhouse, and the other areas, then the FFA program would follow, and the SAE programs (Supervised Agricultural Experience) would follow.”
The SAE programs are required experiences for students in the ag program at Central Lee, but the FFA program is the one that fosters leadership and a focus in other areas of agriculture including sales and marketing.
Boeck said the education, FFA, and SEA make up a 3-circle model for the ag education complex at Central Lee, which he said is fairly unique.
“I think the agricultural education program has been doing it right for a long time, and there's some other folks starting to catch up with that, and we’re starting to see more real-life experience in and out of the classroom.
David Vance, a 23-year-old instructor at FMHS from Iowa State, said learning under Boeck and other instructors at Central Lee helped mold his career path, much as it did others at the school.
“I would say that was the reason I went into education,” he said.
“I always knew I was going to be in ag of some sort. I grew up on a farm and I enjoyed it. I took all of Tom's and (Brent) Koller’s classes when I was there,” Vance said.
“I enjoyed it and, in my senior year, I got to thinking about what I was going to do. And then I thought I kind of like this. I liked being here, and so I talked to them a little more. Mr. Koller let me sit in on his eighth-grade classes and just help out. It wasn't an official thing. I was just taking it in a little bit and I kind of decided ‘you know, let's try it’ so I went for ag education.”
Vance has helped escalate a program in Fort Madison where students get to work crops in a real land lab setting. Vance said he was exposed to the same thing under Boeck at Central Lee.
Fort Madison has about 40 acres of land that students farm on the west side of Fort Madison on ground near the PreK-6th grade building.

Students in the classroom and in FFA help harvest crops off that land. The program is in its third year and has generated soybeans the first two years. They will be planting corn this spring.
Central Lee has about 45 acres of tillable land, but the district owns another 32 adjacent to it that the district purchased in the 80s. Students work the land throughout the year doing soil tests, planting, fertilizing, harvesting, and even selling the crops after they’ve been harvested.
“The fancy word there is experiential learning,” Boeck said. “They’re managing herbicide fertilizer, going out and meeting other farmers, talking about seed, and what is the best seed to plant. So it’s kind of all aspects of it.”
Vance has carried that program to Fort Madison as have the other students and student teachers out of Boeck’s programs.
“I think it's the hands on. They get to see it, do it, and learn it. It’s doing it to learn and learning to do,” Vance said. “That's a big part of what we do and I don't think it's new, but those hands-on projects like the test plot, that I didn't start, got thrown into my lap, and that’s really awesome.”
Boeck’s first FFA group consisted of one female in a group of about 30 males. Now he says that dynamic has shifted and the FFA group is about 40% female.
“There have been many (girls) in leadership positions and that’s nothing against boys, but the girls just get things done. And we do have a lot of boys that are in leadership positions, as well.”
The FFA program also has a strong scholarship piece at Central Lee. The program provides 10 one-time scholarships annually to graduating seniors. Boeck said those students don’t necessarily have to be going into agriculture, however, the industry is very wide-ranging and the scholarships likely return investment to the ag industry in one way or another.
He also said the passion at Central Lee is one catalyst to the success of the program.
“I think they find their passion here and they find that they want to pass that along to other kids,” he said.
“You see that when our kids win a speech contest or public speaking contest and you say 'wow, that's pretty cool'.”
But Boeck believes there are things that he’s done over the past four decades that are tough to duplicate.
“I've got certain things I do here that would never fly in Fort Madison or Keokuk. Why is that, I don't know, but a part of that has to be the rich history here. It could be the amount of agricultural students we have. And we still have a pretty good foundation of producing agricultural students who are going to go back to the family farm.
Vance comes into the teaching world very young. He graduated from Iowa State before he was 21 years old after student teaching at Mediapolis. His perspective is very career-oriented and he hopes his students take the hands-on experience either to further their education, or back into the ag industry workforce out of high school.
His young age allows him to relate quicker to the students.
“There’s a fine line there between friends and teacher and  that's in stone, yeah, but yeah, being able to relate to them and being able to talk to them is very beneficial,” Vance said.
He said people need to understand that FFA isn’t just for farm kids.
“It’s for everybody. I think it's so important for everyone to have general knowledge of the food supply and chain system,” Vance said.
“A lot of the kids, if you ask them the difference between a steer and heifer they won't be able to tell you, and is that’s an issue. I think it's important for students to understand the basics of where their food comes from, how it gets to their plate. A lot of them can tell you what beef is and where it's from,  but as far as the actual steps in the process, I think there’s a huge disconnect there. I think that's super important in developing those skills and then the FFA for leadership.”
Boeck said he will be accessible in retirement, but has a small farm north of Keokuk that he wants to tend to, as well.
“I do still enjoy doing what I'm doing, I really do. It's just maybe time for some new ideas.” Boeck said.
“Forty years is a long time. The days go slow and the years go fast.”