Ryan Brennecke / The BulletinDale Crawford receives hugs from his students while being honored for his years of teaching agriculture during the annual FFA banquet in Culver on Thursday. Crawford is retiring after 40 years of teaching in Central Oregon.

Dale Crawford wants you to know: Agriculture is more than farming.

There’s horticulture and biology, business management, livestock production, mechanics and engineering, even public speaking skills needed to succeed in an evolving field. As it has changed, so too has the way it’s taught, according to Crawford, the longtime agriculture teacher at Culver High School.

“It’s more about problem solving, accessing information, decision making, and not about ‘These are the parts of a plant,’” said Crawford, 67, who will retire at the end of this school year after 40 years teaching. “They still need to know (that), but there’s more to it.”

Thursday was the annual banquet for Culver’s FFA chapter and when word got out this was Crawford’s last, former students from up and down the West Coast came home to honor their teacher. “It was a tough day for me,” he said Friday. “My voice was definitely crack-y.”

Crawford’s path to teaching started with a phone call from his former agriculture teacher at Bend High School looking for someone to substitute teach some classes. Crawford had been in FFA and gone on to study agriculture at Oregon State University. He was working on his family’s dairy farm at the time, which he claims with pride was the last with a Bend address.

Crawford took the substitute job, and he liked it. He went back to school to get a teaching degree and started teaching at Bend High. After four years, he moved up to Culver High, where he stayed put for the next 34 years.

Teaching spelled the end of the family farm — the day he started at Bend was the day he sold off all the cows — but Crawford has spent plenty of time in the field since then teaching the next generation, including his own grandchildren at Culver. The school has a 13-acre farm where students grow hay and wheat, manage the budget and try out new crops. Last year it was garbanzo beans, and it didn’t go well. “It’s a really ugly crop that takes a fair amount of management,” Crawford said.

Some of his students come into class knowing this is what they will do in life, he said, while others are just curious, and still others don’t know what soil is. But many become like family. “You share their successes, you share their failures, you hug them, you kick them in the behind, you console them,” he said.

As the FFA adviser, Crawford takes students to competitions at least twice a month and in the summer they hit the fair circuit. He’s looking forward to the time off, time to travel (without the students).

At least, that’s what he says. Ask his wife, Liz, and she’ll tell you the summer might fly by, and back-to-school season in the fall will be tough. “This has been his life,” she said.

— Reporter: 541-617-7837,

aspegman@bendbulletin.com