FRANKFORT, Ky. — Students in the Commonwealth are fixing farm equipment to help flood victims. It’s part of a program launched by the Kentucky Horticulture Council.
Various high school agriculture programs across the state are helping repair flood-damaged equipment.
“When I’m working at my dad’s house, it’s really just me working on stuff. But here, it’s really more of a team setting and I get to work with these guys, and they’re pretty great,” said Grant Parsley, who along with his fellow junior classmates, spends most afternoons fixing farm equipment.
It’s taught in the Greenhouse and Small Engines class at Western Hills High School in Frankfort.
“People from eastern Kentucky, they’ll send us stuff, in this case, it’s tillers,” Parsley said. “We got funding… from the state to start working on these, like patching them up for people.”
They’re taking part in this new initiative to fill a critical need.
“You can’t harvest anything. I mean, it’s impossible to till a garden without a tiller,” Parsley said. “Especially in eastern Kentucky. It’s rough soil out there.”
It’s called the Eastern Kentucky Farm Equipment Flood Damage Repair Program.
“We’ll fix them up and we’re really just trying to help the people in eastern Kentucky who lost stuff and really trying to get back to the community,” Parsley said.
The summer floods not only destroyed homes, but also caused damage to lots of equipment. Their teacher, Jeff Shaffer, said it’s great for students to gain experience and find solutions.
“Some [equipment has] really been damaged and some of them are not repairable without buying some parts and stuff. So we’ve had to go through them and take inventory of what we needed and kind of see where was that on that,” Shaffer said.
For Parsley, it really is about giving back in a small way.
“Some of those people, they only have so much. And I know some of them might do small farming and like to take away the things they use for that, and it’s detrimental,” he said. “I mean, some of them only subsist off like the land they have to give this stuff back to them gives them that opportunity just to like go back to the way things were even if it’s only a little bit.”
So far, the school has fixed at least five pieces of equipment.
Breathitt, Clay, Knott, Letcher and Perry counties have sent their equipment. And the Kentucky Horticulture Council distributed them to high school programs in Montgomery, Robertson, Spencer and Franklin counties.