Reedley College Helps Grow Ag Innovation & Education

By Serena Bettis, as reported in Mid Valley Times

In the heart of the Central Valley, itself the heart of California agriculture, Reedley College has focused on cultivating an environment where students can grow into careers in ag and innovative technologies can blossom. 

With more than 2,000 students enrolled in agriculture and natural resources, manufacturing, and engineering and computer science programs, Reedley College is dedicated to growing the next generation of agricultural leaders. Faculty, students and industry partners demonstrated how the college is going about that at the Reedley College Agriculture Conference on Oct. 9. 

“The future as I see it is about creating new opportunities to solve the challenges and address barriers in sustaining our economic base in the Central Valley, and ag is obviously the biggest pillar of our economy,” Reedley College President Jerry Buckley said. 

To open the annual conference, Buckley described the new and expanding programs being offered at Reedley College, as well as the plans to break ground on the campus’s new Ag Innovation Center in 2026. The center will be a two-story, 8,000-square-foot building with offices, meeting spaces, a working shop area and an outdoor equipment yard where ag tech and new equipment can be tested and developed. 

In addition to the traditional agriculture pathways offered in plant science, animal science, mechanical agriculture and ag business, Buckley said Reedley College has non-traditional pathways that support trades in manufacturing, logistics, engineering, data science and more. One of these pathways is the AgTEC certificate program, which provides competency-based education for a variety of ag systems skills. 

Through the program, current farmworkers have the opportunity to take courses in English or Spanish that fit around their schedules and give them the knowledge they need to move up in their careers. Competency-based education means workers will get credit for skills and experience they already have and will tackle new competencies until they have them mastered. 

The program, officially called the AgTEC Workforce program, is one of three programs operated through the F3 Initiative. F3, which stands for farms, food and future, is supported by the Central Valley Community Foundation and was created to support agriculture in the region. The initiative received a $65 million reward from the U.S. Economic Development Administration in 2022. 

Farms, food and future at Reedley College

Reedley College is one of seven Valley community colleges that works with F3 on the AgTEC Workforce program. The college is also connected to other F3 programs, including F3 Innovate. A nonprofit, F3 Innovate supports research partnerships between California State University Fresno, the University of California Merced and University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. 

During the aptly named Innovation at Reedley College panel that closed out the agriculture conference, F3 Innovate CEO Priscilla Koepke said F3 Innovate is intended to “build the critical infrastructure for agriculture’s next era.” 

This means the organization is looking at how it can spur regional economic development, how it builds new career paths for students and how it creates innovations or solutions that will tackle real-world agriculture programs in the region.

“The reason why we’re here at Reedley, one of the core pillars of our work is around talent development, and so we’re focused on kindergarten through graduate level,” Koepke said. “And how do we inspire that next generation to go into agriculture and to really tackle … those innovations that are going to secure the future of agriculture here in … our nation’s most productive agriculture region?”

One of the ways F3 Innovate is doing that includes an internship program for students from Fresno State and UC Merced that began this summer. F3 Innovate sponsored salaries for the students and placed them in ag tech companies around the region. Kopeke said it was such a successful program, they received 100 applications in just one week. 

F3 Innovate is also building community college farm robotics teams, including one at Reedley College that in the spring 2025 semester competed in challenges alongside four-year universities. Panel moderator David Clark, who is dean of instruction for the Reedley College agriculture and natural resources, business and industrial technology programs, said the robotics team brought together not just agriculture students but also engineering and data science students. 

HMC Farms Vice President Drew Ketelsen, who also sits on the F3 Innovate board of directors and spoke on the panel, said for conference attendees who were hearing about F3 for the first time that day, he believes it’s going to be “one of those tools going forward that is going to close the gap for this innovation in agriculture.” 

For Ketelsen, he said it’s been a 10- to 15-year journey trying to figure out innovation at HMC Farms, as there wasn’t any infrastructure or knowledge base for how to develop new practices. 

“But F3, it’s got everything,” Ketelsen said. “It’s got the academic side, it’s got the private sector growers, it’s got tech companies and everywhere in between, and it’s kind of connecting the dots. It’s going to allow everybody to use these public schools and places … for people to develop and test their products. … So rather than myself just (throwing) stuff and the wall and (seeing) what sticks, … we can all collaborate and share.”

Click here to read the original article in Mid Valley Times.