Typically farmers don’t take a city bus or elevated train to the fields each day. But Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences isn’t your typical farm.

Every year as many as 1,500 prospective students apply for 150 spots at the far south side magnet school, and the lucky few who are chosen travel long distances to be a part of school that is producing some of the top, young Ag minds in the U.S.

“Our students have a unique opportunity, that no other students in the city of Chicago have,” said Lucille Shaw, head FFA advisor at the school.

Members of the IFMA17 congress also had a unique opportunity Tuesday afternoon to tour CHSAS, which sits on a 72-acre plot of land just down the street from another of the city’s public schools, Chicago Morgan Park.

For all intensive purposes CHSAS is a fully functioning farm, while teaching its students traditional subjects like math and history. Included on the campus is a barn for pigs, goats and horses, a fish farm and of course midwestern staple crops like corn and soybeans. There is also a machine shop for students to fix machinery and a large hive of bees, where the students harvest honey and sell it, along with other items produced by students in a small store in front of the school.

“I think this school gives kids an opportunity to be exposed to something they otherwise would not have,” Shaw said. “It was an untapped resource, especially by minorities, for so many years.”

Before spending a few hours at CHSAS, the IFMA17 members gathered for a tour of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where agricultural products such as corn, wheat and pork bellies are traded on the open market.

The group arrived in time to see the CME open at 9:30 a.m., to watch buyers and sellers go to work in the “pits.”

“I don’t know what to think of it,” said Heiko Zeller, a German student from the University of Applied Sciences in Eberswalde. “There’s a lot of money being made out there, but it seems a little crazy.”

Stops were also made at Millennium Park, a large vegetative outdoor area that sits in the shadow of the newly named Willis (Sears) Tower, and a lunch at the University of Illinois’ Illini Room, just a few blocks form the park.

“It’s an amazing use of a public space,” said University of Queensland senior lecturer Don Cameron said of Millennium. “You could just come here and relax with nature in the middle of the city.”

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