One-week-old lambs with their moms at Chico State’s farm. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

Learning to drive farm equipment is not taught at every university. It is, though, a class taught at Chico State.

Kay, a sophomore at the university, led a group from OLLI on a tour this month of Chico’s working farm. She mentioned taking the tractor class. Good thing because she was driving a tractor that pulled us along in a trolly.

Chico is one of four CSU campuses with a working farm. The others are Fresno State, Cal Poly Pomona and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. (CSU system has 22 campuses.)

Ag is one of the bigger programs at Chico State. Beyond the classroom students learn on the 800-acre Paul L. Byrne Memorial University Farm that was established in 1960.

Chico’s university farm has been around since 1960. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

Research projects run the gamut. Regenerative farming techniques are big. Animals, plants, machinery—they are all part of the curriculum.

This is definitely a working farm where disciplines are integrated. For instance, a sign says: Organic Dairy Demonstration Site—adaptive, multi-paddock grazing, no-till multispecies seeding, and compost applications. This is all part of the regenerative agriculture initiative.

An irrigation training facility is part of the farm. “One of the goals of developing this facility is to support the adoption of new technologies in water measurement and control that will lead to water conservation,” according to the farm’s website.

About 100 cows are in the dairy, with 60 producing milk. The milk is sold to Organic West in the Central Valley. The college also partners with Sierra Nevada Cheese Co.

Some of the produce ends up in the food services on campus, the student pantry, and other places. Plant materials go to local farms.

Units at the farm include: beef, crops and orchards, greenhouses, farm store, meats lab, organic dairy, sheep, and swine.

“Students take part in every aspect of the operation—from daily heard management and data collection to artificial insemination, calving, performance evaluation, and marketing,” a sign about the beef unit says.

The meats lab is where animals are harvested (aka killed), processed and sold. Beef, pork and lamb products are for sale at the lab as well at the farm store. Sierra Nevada Brewery also purchases meat from the university farm. It is USDA certified, meaning federal inspectors are on site.

The largest varietal of walnuts at Chico State’s farm are chandler. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

The farm store also has Sierra Nevada Cheese for sale, and on this day fresh lettuce that made for a delicious salad that evening.

Every summer a u-pick peach event takes place; which for some reason I keep missing.

Many of the young animals are sold to FFA and 4-H kids for their projects.

On most tours various aspects of the farm are pointed out without actually being able to go into the areas with animals or walking through the fields. The is mostly to protect the animals from being introduced to a human disease, and then presumably to not destroy crops and projects that are under way.

However, on this particular field trip Mimi, who runs the sheep program, invited us in to see week-old lambs. It was like being around puppies and anxious moms who wondered who all these two legged animals were.

Mimi is one of a handful of people who live at the farm in one of the apartments.

Some of the people on the farm are paid, others are interns, others are part of a class.

Tour information is available by calling 530.898.6343.