The John Bowne Agricultural Program has been recognized nationally as an outstanding urban agricultural education offering. The department has constantly updated its curriculum to incorporate the new statewide curriculum and reflect New York’s agricultural employment opportunities.

One of the unique and educationally sound aspects of this instructional program is the relationship between classroom instruction and learning by actually doing. Students develop their required supervised work experience program on the school’s land laboratory during their first summer of enrollment. Some two hundred students are then placed in both city and farm jobs for their second and third summers.

John Bowne graduates go on to agricultural and technical colleges, Cornell University and many out-of-state institutions throughout the northeast before establishing themselves in leadership positions in agricultural professions such as veterinarians, landscape architects, teachers, florists, animal laboratory technicians and other related professionals.