Girl Scout Gold Award: Biosecurity - The Life Skills Train

These are the signs I created for my Girl Scout Gold Award project on Biosecurity.

Biosecurity at a High School Farm Facility, by Jennifer Ott

The McNeil FFA chapter in Austin, Texas leads the way in promoting animal health in a school farm facility! I’m Jennifer Ott, an eleventh grader currently with the North Clackamas FFA in Oregon. I created a biosecurity program structured for a high school farm facility while I still lived in Texas. I created this program as my Girl Scout Gold Award project with my FFA advisors Mr. Larry Vinklarek and Ms. Meagan deMasi to help improve the health of the animals, to lower vet bills, and to teach best practices to future farmers.

This program was first implemented in the 2016-2017 school year and is continuing. I posted metal signs around the farm to remind students of these practices and created paper checklists to be used by each student to monitor the livestock’s health on a daily and weekly basis. Some of the signs included warning symptoms to look for and how to determine the severity of an illness. Before I left for Oregon, I taught my fellow peers and some of their parents how to use the new program in person. I have also created a Powerpoint video to show these best practices to everyone. Please click on this link to go see my video https://youtu.be/zT0hkCUGWL0. The video includes pictures demonstrating how to care for animals with biosecurity measures. Most importantly, it shows how to prevent spreading illnesses between animals by watching for early signs of illness and using better hygiene. This program, I hope, will continue to show great results and I had a blast creating it.

Here is one of the many signs I created as part of my Girl Scout Gold Award project on Biosecurity at a school farm.