Published: May 03, 2008 11:48 pm            

AT RANDOM: Lane sees benefits of agriculture education

Bobby Lane loves watching things grow, whether it be a plant, a child or a newborn baby goat.

Lane has been a professor at Sam Houston State University’s agricultural and industrial science department for more than 24 years, and was the former department chair.

Originally from Mobile, Ala., Lane grew up loving the outdoors.

“My great-grandfather had a farm in south-central Alabama, and I used to go there with my grandparents quite a bit,” she said. “I loved being on a farm in the country, and my great-grandfather still plowed with an old mule. He didn't have a tractor, and this was back in the 1950s. Farmers in the southeast were still pretty poor, and when he was in his 80s, I can remember him plowing with that dang mule.”

According to Lane, he moved to Nederland, Texas, where he went to high school and got involved in 4-H and Future Farmers of America.

“I met some neighborhood boys in Nederland that invited me along, and that’s how I kicked off my love for agriculture,” he said. “I’d always gardened, but I never knew that you could actually do something in school with agriculture. I had some really outstanding 4-H leaders, and a high school agriculture teacher that was a mentor and a second father to me, and all those people helped me develop my interest in agriculture.”

Lane said that his agriculture teacher took him under his wing and helped him develop his leadership and speaking skills.

“He built my confidence up a lot,” he said.

Lane was exposed to Huntsville during high school, and visited SHSU for career development events for high school FFA kids.

“We came to a lot of events at SHSU, and when I was in high school, my agriculture teacher would always bring every kid in the chapter to compete against other chapters, so one year I would judge meats and the next year I'd judge livestock,” Lane said. “The last year, I happened to raise a few chickens in my backyard in Nederland, so I trained the poultry team, and we came here and placed pretty high, so I felt pretty good about myself.”

When it came time for college, Lane looked at SHSU and Texas A&M University, and chose SHSU because of a scholarship.

“Coming from Alabama, I didn't know anything about A&M, and not growing up in Texas early on, I didn't think A&M held any sway over anybody else,” he said.

After earning his undergraduate degree in agriculture education, Lane received his master's and doctoral degrees in agronomy from Texas A&M.

“When I finished at SHSU, I went to graduate school at A&M and got my masters, and my mother asked me if I wished I'd gone there initially,” he said. “I said no way on earth, I wouldn't trade my days here at SHSU for anything. I liked Huntsville, and I loved the natural beauty and small town atmosphere, and as I came here and got to know a lot of the professors, I really loved the camaraderie that the students and the faculty had. It was a wonderful experience.”

Lane said he chose his undergraduate degree because it combined his love of science with his love for the outdoors and seeing things grow.

“I wanted to combine my love of science with something pragmatic that I could actually put to some use,” he said. “Agriculture was a natural fit for me.”

His years at A&M helped him realize how much he loved teaching college students.

“When I went to A&M, I studied agronomy, which is soil and crop sciences,” he said. “I had professors there that motivated me a lot and got me interested in plants and soils, and I decided I wanted to become more specialized, because agriculture education is very general. Once I got there, they allowed me to teach some labs in graduate school, and that’s what really developed my love of teaching. I had students who really wanted to learn, so when I could offer them something that I could see made a difference to them, I realized that it was the life I liked. I get a lot of personal satisfaction from teaching.”

According to Lane, for him, teaching isn’t about money,

“You won’t get rich, but the richness comes from the experience of one on one, or the classroom experience,” he said “It’s an irreplaceable experience when someone comes back years and years later and says, ‘I took your class 20 years ago and it’s valuable to me, I use it all the time’”.

Lane said that one of the greatest benefits about working at SHSU is the Gibbs Ranch.

“The property allows me to learn real world application of what we discuss in class,” he said. “I have used that piece of property for so many different experimental studies with my students. We have 250 head of cattle and 50 head of goats, and to be able to discuss reproduction, nutrition, physiology and diseases in a lecture and then in the afternoon go to lab and show and demonstrate what they learned is wonderful. It is a tremendous resource for us to be able to teach by example.”

According to Lane, it also gives faculty members a chance to practice what they preach.

“Its pretty common for faculty to be perceived sitting in an ivory tower and spouting out what you know from a text book,” he said. “But we are able to actually put it to use.”

When Lane is not teaching, he loves to work in his garden.

“I’ve been gardening since I was six years old, and I think anybody in the field of agriculture has a natural love of watching things grow,” he said. “You’re surrounded by so much death and destruction and illness, and yet there’s always the idea that hope springs eternal. You can watch a seed come up from the soil and to watch baby goats be born and their mother nurture them and they are up nursing 10 minutes after they are born. There’s something special about that to me.”

Lane said another reason he loves agriculture is because it can be a great teacher.

“There are so many programs today in the suburban areas with FFA and 4-H,” he said. “Kids really get into taking care of with animals and raising steers and hogs. There is a lot of reward from that, but with it, there are tremendous disappointments, which is what I think is good about agriculture. You get the bad with the good, and it teaches a lot of life lessons.”

Lane believes mission work can also be important for developing character and learning other cultures.

“It’s a real eye-opening experience to be intimately involved with a group of individuals in another country.” he said. “You don’t even speak the common language, but they can share with you. Those are just experiences that there's no substitute for, especially internationally. It opens your eyes to some of the issues faced by common people: The poverty, the malnutrition, the lack of housing, and the challenges they face every day of just getting a meal to eat. At the same time, it seems to me like the poorer someone is, the stronger their faith is. I think the more material possessions we acquire, and the richer we become financially, the more we think we are responsible for al our material possessions instead of thankful to God. I believe that when people have very little they are closer to God, because every day their existence is dependent upon nature’s blessing and the natural world.”

Lane truly has a love for helping others, the natural world, and learning about the world around him.

“I get out to my garden and spend some quiet time, my meditation time, but I also use it as time to learn more,” he said. “Every year is a little different, and when I grow something, it's a time for me to look at the interaction between what I'm doing as a human and what nature is doing with me.”

        

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