Inside the bustling arena at the Indiana FFA State Convention, surrounded by a sea of students wearing blue corduroy jackets with gold lettering, Duane Huge moves with the quiet confidence of a man who spent nearly four decades standing at the front of a classroom.
Huge spent 20 years cultivating young minds at Cloverdale High School and another 18 years at Danville before retiring in 2023. But if you ask anyone in Indiana’s agricultural community, retirement is a word that only exists on paper.
“People say I haven’t retired yet, I guess,” Huge chuckles. “Because as soon as I retired, the idea came up to restart the mentoring program in Indiana. So now, instead of being the guy in front of the classroom, I’m the guy sitting in the back of the classroom helping all of our new beginning ag teachers.”
Ag teachers are the bedrock of local FFA chapters and rural communities. Yet, as school district budgets tighten across the state, the financial strain on vocational agriculture programs has become increasingly acute.
“School finance has gotten tighter and tighter every year,” Huge explains. “More and more agriculture teachers—all teachers in general—are needing to utilize outside grants from outside organizations to fill a lot of those gaps in funding that the schools have right now.”
To ensure local programs don’t just survive, but flourish, a coalition of retired agricultural educators stepped up to build a lasting legacy. Led by retired Benton Central teacher Dale Butcher, the group established the Indiana Teach Ag Fund—a permanent endowment designed to recruit, train, support, and retain agricultural educators for generations to come.
The initiative was sparked after a temporary Lilly Endowment grant expired, leaving a void for crucial professional development, mentor programs, and classroom enhancement grants.
“A group of retired ag teachers led by Dale Butcher got the idea: What if we were able to establish an endowment fund to be able to generate dollars to do some of those things after the grant was over, because so many of those things were so impactful?” Huge says.
To get the endowment off the ground, organizers needed to raise $10,000 in seed money to partner with a community foundation. When Butcher laid out the challenge to retired teachers across Indiana, the response was immediate and overwhelming.
“He looked at the other retired ag teachers in the state and said, ‘We’re going to do this,’” Huge recalls. “And within two months’ time, we raised the money that it was going to take to establish the endowment.”
Under the structure of a permanent endowment, the fund’s principal will remain untouched, allowing generated interest to fuel teacher recruitment, mentor programs, Curriculum for Agricultural Science Education (CASE) training, and workshops alongside the Indiana Association of Agricultural Educators (IAAE).
For those who have dedicated their lives to agricultural education, the fund isn’t just about balancing budgets—it’s about nurturing the soil for seeds they may never see fully bloom.
“We as retired ag teachers want to plant the seed today,” Huge says. “And looking at 20, 30 years down the road, if the fund could grow to hundreds of thousands of dollars and we were in a position where we could award $20,000 or $30,000 a year in classroom enhancement, professional development, and beginning teacher assistant grants, what a great idea.”
How to Support the Indiana Teach Ag Fund
-
By Mail: Tax-deductible contributions can be made payable to the Indiana FFA Foundation (P.O. Box 9, Trafalgar, IN 46181) with “Indiana Teach Ag Fund” written in the check memo line.
-
Online: CLICK HERE to contribute through the Indiana FFA website.
