KFB's 2024 Excellence in Ag Winner is taking her love of agriculture beyond the farmgate.

Bethany Mattingly grew up on a farm, understanding the hard work it takes to keep it going and gathering an appreciation of what lessons farm life can teach.

In fact, her love for agriculture paved a career pathway for her, on and off the farm.

“I grew up on a family farm where we grew tobacco, along with some row crops when I was younger,” she said. “One of my big projects growing up was taking care of the bottle calves we had. We moved more into beef production and hay as I got older. But it was when I joined FFA in high school that I found my passion for agriculture education and advocacy work, which led me to be an ag teacher.”

After graduating from Eastern Kentucky University, Mattingly began her education career at Seneca High School in Jefferson County, holding that position for 12 years.

“That program had been around since the 1980s or so, but they were looking for a way to add more people to the program, more students and more opportunities,” she said. “In completing the Excellence in Ag application, the majority of the information I included told the story of what happened to transform Seneca's agriculture education program into the success it is today. That was a great story to be a part of and it was a great story to tell.”

While her time at Seneca came to a close, her work in ag education would continue into her role today as Division Director of Agriculture Education and Outreach in the Office of Agriculture Marketing at the Kentucky Department of Agriculture.   

“One of the first things I had the opportunity to work on in this position was our recent Agriculture Education Week for the State of Kentucky,” Mattingly said. “It has been thrilling to be a part of that, and it's been a great experience working with Commissioner [Jonathan] Shell to get the message across about agriculture education and the power it has for the future of the agriculture industry—not just for those in the industry, but for all consumers."

As passionate as she is about education, Mattingly’s first love was the farm, something that she has carried with her all of her life.

"I may have started thinking about having my own farm possibly since birth," she said with a laugh. "I've thoroughly enjoyed the farm and used to go to school and talk about bottle-feeding calves, and going up to the loft in the barn and finding baby kittens. I've always loved working with the calves and the animals.”

Mattingly said she realized how much she craved the farm life when she moved into a college dorm room on Eastern Kentucky University’s campus.

“There was just so much concrete, and I needed to be around green,” she said. “When you grow up in the middle of a farm, you can feel the trees, and the sky, and the clouds, and the grass, and the animals, and everything. There's just a calmness that comes from being there.”

Mattingly said as she progressed with her career in agriculture education, she began looking for a farm to call her own.  

“It took me about four years before I found the right spot,” she said. “I bought a little six-acre farm that had a barn and a house. It wasn't a perfect situation, but I could at least get something started. And once I got started, I knew it was exactly what I was missing."

It was on that farm that Mattingly began her other career as a farmer… more specifically, a sheep farmer.

"I bought my first small flock of Gotland sheep on that farm, and one of the reasons I got into sheep was because we have so many people who are doing smaller farms where they just want to homestead and provide for their family, and sheep are a great way to do that. They help maintain the land but can also provide things like meat, milk, and wool, and they're a little bit more manageable if you haven't worked with livestock before."

Mattingly sold that first farm about three years ago and moved on to something bigger: 40 acres and many more sheep.

“This is about my third year at the new farm in Henry County, and I went from 18 sheep on those six acres to 70 breeding ewes and some rams,” she said. “I'm very proud of it but still have a lot of work to do and a lot of room to grow, but I'm excited with where I'm going in the future.”

Mattingly’s firsthand experience with ag education, advocacy, and farming has been instrumental in communicating the importance of agriculture to those who have no connection to a farm.

“I used to tell my students you can't go five seconds without being impacted by agriculture,” she said. “Whether it's the chair you're sitting in, the pencil in your hand, or the air you breathe, you are absolutely being impacted by agriculture constantly.”

Mattingly serves as an example of how even the smallest farms can lead to big impacts and can provide opportunities for a new generation looking to find their pathway to the farm.

“There's nothing that we have anymore that you cannot tie to agriculture in some way,” she said. “It's that big of a part of our lives, and we must preserve it so that we can continue having those resources that we need.”