A John Deere Publication

Nancy Caywood wearing a black Caywood Farms shirt and smiling

More than 100,000 people have received an ag education from Nancy Caywood who was named Arizona FFA Agriculturist of the Year in 2023.

Agriculture, Education November 01, 2024

Farm Tour Master Class

Don't call it tourism, these visitors get an ag education.

by Martha Mintz

Hayrides? Sure, those can be had at Caywood Farms. With Nancy Caywood at the wheel though, visitors won't be deposited at a corn maze but in the thick of a cotton field for a hands-on, real-world ag adventure.

The Casa Grande, Arizona, cotton farm is home to the latest in a long line of ag education centers developed by Caywood during her decades-long career as an ag educator and advocate.

It started when Caywood was a traditional educator, teaching first and second grade in Casa Grande. She felt pulled to weave agriculture into her curriculum.

"This was before programs like Ag In The Classroom were a thing. I just saw this disconnect from agriculture and where food comes from with the kids," she says.

The work won her teaching awards and a job offer to develop the Natural Resources Education Center now homed at Central Arizona College.

"We created programming and hosted tours. The area teachers loved it," Caywood says.

She caught the eye of a University of Arizona professor who persistently recruited her into his ag education master's program. The next call was to run outreach programming for the University of California (UC) Desert Research and Extension Center.

"The challenge of my mission was get people to the farm to engage and learn about ag," she says.

With years of experience capturing the attention of 8 and 9-year-olds back in her classroom, Caywood knew hands-on activity was the key to engagement. Visitors needed to not just listen and see, but touch, smell, taste, and do.

For her first teacher-focused UC Farm Smart program project she hand-planted an acre of radishes. "Crazy, I know," she says.

Visitors harvested the radishes and other produce as part of their tour, taking home the ingredients and knowledge to make their own hearty chef salads. They drew 6,500 visitors with this unique program the first year.

Soon, companies lined up to donate transplants, seeds, and fresh produce allowing Caywood and her team to develop expansive gardens and fill many plates. They hosted 10,000 guests annually during her 14-year tenure.

Not long after retiring to the family farm in Arizona, Caywood was recruited yet again. This time, her family urged her to bring ag education and outreach back to her home ag community.

Their farm sits just outside the Greater Phoenix area. Connections to ag have grown increasingly critical as urban sprawl grinds relentlessly into ag territory.

Above. Caywood manually cranks a picker bar to show how spindles inside the cotton picker twist cotton from the boll and route it into the picker basket. A group of teachers cast shadows in the field as they ride the wagon back to the classroom where they'll snack on even more cotton-related foods.

Go home. Go big. "I'm retired. This is a hobby job," Caywood says. It doesn't seem like a hobby for the level of production.

On a hot June day, she herds a group of teachers into a large portable building where she's created a classroom. Rows of chairs face a projector screen wedged between Caywood's props. A full-size cotton bale, buckets of bolls at various maturities, a basket of Twinkies, irrigation siphon tubes, and material swatches stand ready to complement learning.

Students munch on popcorn popped with cottonseed oil while Caywood talks frankly about soil, markets, input costs, drought, equipment, irrigation, crop rotation, and GMOs. She shares about taking off-farm jobs to secure insurance and reliable income. Nothing is off limits.

At one point, Caywood hands out green cotton bolls. She harvests and freezes thousands each year. This allows visitors to have more impactful and memorable interaction. They see and touch the developing fibers and inhale the sweet moist, earthy scent.

As they dissect their pristine cotton bolls, Caywood talks boll worms and eradicating them with GMOs, driving home the devastation of pest damage with photos.

Then it's off to the field for a close-up with the equipment. They might pick cotton or hunt for first blooms. Kid tours are lively with Caywood playing her fiddle and teaching kids songs about water conservation and an insect variation of a favorite.

"The kids will be singing, Head, thorax, ab-do-men...then six legs, two antennae, and compound eyes," she says. "It's great."

Urban teachers to fellow farmers, kids to foreign envoys—they all have fun, snack well, and learn when they visit Caywood. ‡