The animal population is exploding in the Southeast farm.

”We’ve got three baby goats right now,” agriculture teacher Joanna Farmer said. “And when they are grown, we have two of them that are going to Mrs. Maddux’s house, our social worker, and she’s going to keep them on her farm, and the other one is going to be shown in the county fair.”

A different member of the farm, by far the largest, has also been introduced on a permanent loan. We now have a miniature donkey named Jerry.

“He doesn’t belong to us, but they are letting us keep him as long as we want to keep him,” Farmer said. “They just said if we ever want to get rid of him, they want him back. So we’ve been looking for some small animals for a while as some different types of animals, so Jerry came up so that’s why we jumped on that opportunity.”

In the meantime, Jerry’s stay here won’t be just for show. His addition to the farm has been incorporated into a few classes.

“My animal health classes and my animal science classes will work with him and we learned about horses and that type of thing, and since donkeys are very similar, we’re able to use him to do a lot of our different labs and studies with him,” Farmer said.

Farmer hopes to potentially bring another somewhat large animal to the farm sometime in the future.

“We would like to find a miniature cow of some sort. And we think that that would be a great addition so that my ag classes could look at that too,” she said.

Students who are interested in learning more about the animals here should look into joining the FFA club sponsored by Farmer in G112.