Agriculture, as any Nebraskan knows, is an important part of life. Young farmers can learn quite a lot on a family farm, however not everything can be learned on the farm. For this reason there’s college and agriculture majors.

Chris Burbach, originally from Wynot, has been a precision agriculture teacher at Northeast Community College for the past six years. When asked why he chose to be an agriculture teacher Burbach said, “I grew up in agriculture, I grew up on a farm and that subject I’ve always been passionate about. It’s really cool to be able to come back to the school that I actually went through and teach here and be a part of that.”

On Burbach’s own farm he grows crops and raises cattle. He enjoys the row crop farming part a bit more. In his free time, he enjoys kayaking and playing his drums in his basement. “I like music a lot, I play drums in my basement basically and get together with some friends and we do that kind of stuff now and then,” Burbach said.

As any farmer knows, things won’t always work out the way you want or need them too.

Generally, there are a lot of issues, and being in the classroom is no exception. “We were out in the field today (Aug. 30, 2018) doing some stuff, trying to experiment with some new apps used for crop scouting, we basically just had a massive cross connection of GPS signals and such. It took us about 20 minutes to get it figured out. It was just kind of an unforeseen thing we didn’t really expect, but it was an interesting deal.” Burbach explained.

Burbach’s least favorite thing about his job is the late hours and grading the papers. On the flip side, Burbach likes his job due to the impact he can have on his students’ lives. “It’s really nice to be able to interact with as many people as I get to and meet different people and where they come from and things like that and to just try to have that impact on them and their lives, that’s really the big piece.”