Joyce Ostrom was 10 years old when she started in 4-H — 69 years ago. It’s had a few changes since then, but she’s remained active in 4-H in all that time.

It’s National 4-H Week, and across the country, the organization is celebrating its century-long history. Generations have benefited from the activities, lessons and connections that come from participating in 4-H.

When Ostrom started with 4-H, the program “was primarily for agricultural-type kids, farm families,” she recalled. “The farm was very, very important back then.”

Back in the 1950s, about 6 million people were employed in the agricultural industry in the United States. Today, with double the population, a little more than 2 million people work in the industry.

Ostrom was born in Elko, Nevada, and raised in Yerrington, Nevada, which is close to Reno.

Her parents were immigrants from Switzerland and had two farms. Her mother needed someone to do the sewing. So she enrolled Ostrom in a 4-H sewing program.

“Well, I fell in love with sewing, and I’ve been sewing ever since,” Ostrom said. 

She and her brother wanted to raise a cow, and her dad insisted they have a dairy heifer for 4-H. All the other kids had Herefords, but their dad told them if they did a dairy calf for one year, then they could have a Hereford.

Ostrom hurt her back in a horse accident, and she didn’t get to work with her calf as much as she had hoped. When it came time to show her animal, she had trouble getting it calmed down. Despite the difficulty, she won the first-place purple ribbon.

Her experience in 4-H led her to study home economics, as it was known then, in college. She became a home economics teacher in northern Nevada, and she was employed as a cooperative extension agent in home economics for the University of Nevada.

Ostrom and her family moved to Powell in 1983, and she continued her work in 4-H as a leader. All three of her sons were in 4-H, as was her granddaughter.

“We’re a strong 4-H family,” Ostrom said.

She remembers her late son, Danny, at 8 years old, doing a demonstration on how to set a nail. He ended up hitting his thumb.

Rather than just carry on as if nothing went wrong, Danny explained to the audience, “That’s what not to do.”

While 4-H retains many of its values, Ostrom said it’s programmatically changed a lot. It’s now more competitive. When she was a 4-H kid, it was much more local. So you might win a ribbon as recognition. Now you win at the county level, go on to state and then can advance to national competitions.

While 4-H also offers a lot more activities for kids to participate in, including their own directed studies on their own interests — Ostrom recalls one member doing an exhibit on snakes — there are sports, robotic clubs and video games competing for kids’ interest.

“The kids aren’t choosing 4-H as a focus, which is understandable,” Ostrom said.

The activities used to be much more focused in agriculture, limited to projects such as canning and gardening. Now that the family farm has become much more industrialized, so has 4-H.

“The changes,” Ostrom said, “have been from small-time agriculture to big-time agriculture.”