Kaity Bowman came up with the idea for Flowers for Farm Safety the summer after she had a baby. She was home a lot, thinking about the school year she'd missed chunks of, and wanting to do something that combined what she loved — floral arranging — with what she thought her ag program should be doing anyway. She texted her co-teacher. He said it was amazing. She said, okay, we're doing it.

That's about how fast it moved from there.

Bowman is in her sixth year teaching agriculture at Macomb High School — intro to ag, horticulture, vet science, wildlife and natural resources — half of a two-teacher ag program serving roughly 150 to 160 students. She started in 2020. "That was wild," she said. Horticulture has always been her class, and within it, the floral side has always been her thing. Her co-teacher, who taught it before her, preferred the greenhouse. They flipped when she arrived. They still sell plants in the greenhouse every spring. But this year, Bowman decided: if she's teaching horticulture, they're going to do what she thinks is a lot of fun.

Farm safety is personal for her. Her dad is a truck driver who goes in and out of grain bins regularly. Her husband farms. Grain bins, she'll tell you plainly, are one of the most underappreciated dangers in agricultural life — flowing grain behaves like quicksand, and by the time a person realizes they're sinking, it's often too late. "In less than four seconds." Most of her students — the percentage of actual farm kids at Macomb High is very small — have no idea.

So she built a program that would change that, and fund the tools to respond when the worst happens.

Flowers for Farm Safety is a floral subscription program. Community members sign up, pay a monthly fee, and receive flower arrangements delivered by students once a month. The proceeds go to the McDonough County Fire and Rescue, earmarked for grain bin rescue equipment — specifically, Bowman said, a harness and pulley system used to extract people who've become trapped. She's been working with Adam Rhoades at McDonough County Rescue. When she opened the sign-up form, she didn't know what to expect. Thirty people signed up almost immediately. Then forty. Then it kept climbing. She capped it at forty-five — the most she figured her students could handle in their first year, with a week to work with fresh flowers and get deliveries out.

The first arrangement was sunflowers and assorted locally grown flowers from Rows and Rose, a local flower farm. Basically just putting flowers in a vase, she said. But the class kept learning, the students kept getting better, and by November, Bowman was watching something unexpected: real talent, in this particular group, in this particular year. Not something you can count on every year. So over Thanksgiving break, she mapped out a bigger idea.

When students came back, she handed them a packet — every week between now and Valentine's Day, every task that needed to happen. We're going to run a floral shop. That's the class project. The students voted on a name from four or five options. Bomber Blooms won. They elected a shop manager — Dakota Thorman, a senior. Then they self-sorted into groups: design, finance, marketing, and promotions. Bowman gave each group a framework and stepped back. "I didn't assign anything," she said. "I was like, you guys, this is your project. You are going to figure out where you fit best."

It wasn't always smooth. A few weeks before Valentine's Day, she called what she diplomatically described as a come-to-Jesus talk. The groups were at odds with each other. She told them: This is real life. Life is a group project. You may not like the people that you work with. But you still have to get the job done. They had over 50 orders from the community and the school. They had to see it through.

They did. The Valentine's week shop sold single-stem roses — the biggest seller in the building, easy to deliver — and one featured arrangement the students named the Love Bomb. They were proud of that one.

Between Bomber Blooms and the Flowers for Farm Safety subscription program, the class will donate over $7,000 to McDonough County Fire and Rescue. Bowman said she hopes no one ever has to use the equipment. "But," she added, "I know that's wishful thinking."

This spring, she's planning a field trip to a grain bin rescue training facility — she's been in contact with the Illinois Corn Growers Association — so students can see the equipment in action. And she's thinking about what Bomber Blooms becomes next: homecoming, prom, Mother's Day, a community flower-arranging class taught by students alongside the local florist who has been a strong supporter of the Horticulture program. She's being careful not to undercut that florist — Bloom Macomb does internships, and if some of these students stay in town, she'd like to send them there. "Flower design is kind of a dying art," Bowman said. "And when you can find kids that are really passionate about it, that's something."