Butler, Warren educators double as family farmers

WARREN COUNTY — The sun is just starting its climb, but Dustin Goldie has already fed his cattle, checked on chickens and turkeys, fed the farm pond fish and surveyed the corn and soybean crops from atop his massive combine reaper.

Despite the cool wetness of lingering, early morning fog, the father of five is already working up sweat on his 40 acres in northern Warren County’s Harlan Twp.

Goldie does what hundreds of other area farmers do, but he and his wife, Tracy, also do something else that makes them an historical rarity.

Dustin and Tracy Goldie are teachers.

The lifestyles of the two Kings High School instructors are a 21st Century throwback to America’s earlier rural, agricultural roots.

And the 37-year-old Dustin is no stranger to history, teaching the subject at the Deerfield Twp. high school.

Tracy teaches math and that comes in handy when balancing their family farm ledgers.

Farming, they say, makes them better teachers.

“A lot of people talk about the hardship of farming and teaching, but our attitude with both is there are no setbacks. There is no failure, there is only growth and you learn so much from your hardships and your setbacks,” Dustin said.

“In the classroom it’s the same way. We ask ourselves ‘did this lesson fail?’ Well what can I do to get better. If my corn didn’t come up the way I wanted it to, what research can I do? What new fertilizer should we try?” he said. “We always look at setback out here as opportunity.”

The family farm gives Tracy plenty of real-life math equations to share with her students.

In her advanced placement statistics class, she uses “an example of a normal model using the mean weight of a steer of 1,000 pounds and they give the standard deviation of 200 pounds. That allows us to talk about the amount the cows vary in weight, what causes these variances, and how it affects our business.”

In Butler County’s Madison Twp., another member of the rare farmer-educator club uses his farm to introduce youngsters to farming.

This week Madison Elementary Principal Jason Jackson will invite his 900 students to his 160-acre farm over a two-day period for some hours learning first-hand about farming, livestock and a world largely gone by for most of modern society.

“Sometimes with education we get stuck with the idea that everything can be found in textbooks,” said Jackson, who is a Madison Twp. native from a farm family.

“Our kids don’t have the opportunity to grow up on a farm so we relate a lot (during the field trips) to education,” he said.

But both farm families agree getting back to the land doubles as a healthy outlet from school work.

“Farming is my get-away and stress relief,” Jackson said.

Dustin Goldie said it’s the best of both worlds.

“The Lord has blessed us with a lot of opportunities in life. My wife and I can affect children in a positive way at school and we’re blessed to be here at the farm, closer in touch with nature,” he said.