When the Loomis School opened in the fall of 1914, the study of agriculture was one of three curriculums offered in the Boys Division. The program was designed to prepare boys for both advanced college work in agriculture and to take up farming as a profession upon graduation from Loomis.

The course offerings in this program included English, Math, and History along with accounting, physics, mechanical drawing, and woodworking. The required Agricultural Science courses focused on topics such as animal husbandry, floriculture, dairy herd management, and market gardening. Students worked on individual projects under the supervision of the farm manager. Some underclassmen built poultry houses, raised their own poultry flocks, and sold eggs locally while upperclassmen worked on projects involving the school’s dairy herd.

One unique option in the agriculture curriculum was “actual farming carried on by the boy on land rented from the school”. Boys could finance their farming efforts with their own money or with money borrowed from the school at a fair interest rate. This was meant to simulate the authentic experience of farm owners and according to the school catalog, “vitalize all the work”.

The rich, fertile floodplain land on campus, farmed for centuries before the school opened, was used to grow corn and hay for the dairy herd and cultivated in part by students in the agricultural program. By 1915 students were the primary farmers of about 100 acres of the school’s 150 acres of land.

Home front efforts during World War I temporarily shifted the use of much of the school’s land as students and faculty joined together in the summers of 1917 and 1918 to raise potatoes, corn, and other vegetables to meet the school’s entire produce needs for those school years. Grass was left to grow on Loomis’ main quadrangle and athletic fields during those summers and 45 tons of hay was harvested for farm use.

The formal Agriculture curriculum was phased out in 1930. For about 15 more years, students could earn diploma credits and prepare for college study with projects undertaken on the school farm.

Through the mid-twentieth century, the dairy farm developed a herd of high-producing purebred Holstein and Guernsey dairy cows that supplied the Loomis and Chaffee schools with milk. Surplus milk was sold to local markets. The school’s on-campus milk house pasteurized and bottled 300,000 quarts of milk a year by 1952. In 1962, the herd of 130 registered Holsteins was dispersed at auction and the farm was closed.