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David Miles

David Miles
David Miles

Teaching from the farm

History graduate David Miles at Vermont's Billings Fram and Museum

With a graduate degree in history, David Miles thought he would take the next step and become a college professor and teach.

And when Miles was obtaining his master's in agriculture history from Iowa State, he spent several semesters as a teaching assistant.

"There were students in class who really wanted to learn and others that were there only because it was a required course," Miles said.

He experienced something completely different during his semester-long assistantship at Des Moines' Living History Farms.

"Once I got into a museum setting, most of the people who came to Living History Farms wanted to be there," he said. "They wanted to learn."

Miles has been teaching those individuals now for 30 years, 15 at Living History Farms and the past 16 at Billings Farm and Museum in Woodstock, Vt.

As the assistant director of the museum and working dairy farm, Miles "supervises everything a visitor to the farm would encounter." That includes hiring and training of the staff and the development of educational programs, special events and school programming.

He works with the facility's farm manager to "develop interpretive programs for public consumption."

The Billings Farm and Museum is a working farm of 250 acres in central Vermont. It is adjacent to and shares programs with the Billings-Marsh-Rockefeller National Historic Park, one of the newest units in the National Park Service.

More than 50,000 visitors annually come to Woodstock to see the dairy cows and the crops (such as corn, alfalfa and grasses) grown on the site.

The Billings Farm also raises Jersey cows, which Miles describes as one of the best herds in the nation, as well as sheep, horses and chickens.

When Miles joined the farm museum's staff, he was hired to develop historical and public interpretative programs.

"Here was a wonderful opportunity to teach people about agriculture and farming in a setting where they wanted to learn," he said.

With the assistance of a full-time staff and a part-time of 50 interpreters, Miles has developed programs such as "Check out the Chickens" where upwards of 75 people will spend 30 minutes with an interrupter discussing chickens and egg production.

Or "Time Traveler Tuesdays" where school children not only dress in period costumes but also churn butter, play old-fashion parlor games and help prepare food grown on the farm.

"It's a very popular program," Miles says. "Tuesdays are one of our biggest days attendance wise.

"Our visitors want a learning opportunity that is an experience as opposed to a traditional static museum exhibit," he continued. "As a historian I love to go to a museum, but I can only look at artifacts and read the exhibits for so long. But if I talk to someone about the exhibit I will enjoy it much more.

"It's that type of experience that we provide at the Billings Farm. People leave here thinking about topics and issues that they did not even know existed in agriculture. They leave realizing that farming is much more complex than they even dreamed about."