Residents, Students Connect With Local Ag Community
Posted
Tim Robertson-trobertson@timesuniononline.com
Area residents got up close and personal with local agriculture at the 12th annual Kosciusko County Ag Day Tuesday at the Kosciusko County Fairgrounds.
The event featured tours through a kind of agricultural fair Tuesday and today for fourth-graders from area elementary schools. Tuesday night, the event opened to the public for the Taste of Ag dinner featuring food grown in Kosciusko County and the Ag Olympics.Students had an interactive, educational experience Tuesday afternoon as they visited booths where they listened to eight-minute presentations about beef, ducks, 4-H, soils and water quality, farm machinery, farm safety, dairy, chickens, horticulture, swine, sheep and crops. The booths were staffed by local volunteer experts from each field.
"These are one-day old," volunteer Courtney Flynn told a group of fourth-graders from Lincoln Elementary School as she handed each of them a fuzzy, yellow chick.
"Before any of you want to take one home because it's cute, you should look over here at these," she said, pointing to a cage containing larger chickens. "These are only 6 weeks old."
At other booths, students planted seeds, watched a demonstration of how cows are milked, and learned how many quarter-pound hamburgers can come from one beef steer (more than 1,000).
Purdue Extension Educator Kelly Easterday said the goal of bringing young students to Ag Day is to give them personal interaction with the agricultural community and make it a good experience.
"Most of the students are two or three generations removed from the farm," she said. "Some of these kids, it's the first time they've ever seen a farm animal up close."
Teacher Judy Kinsey, Harrison Elementary School, has been bringing her students to Ag Day for 12 years. "This is an outstanding opportunity for kids to get as close a first-hand experience without actually going to the farm," Kinsey said. "Kosciusko County is a major agricultural county. It contributes globally in agriculture. We're very fortunate to have these resources."
About 1,800 people attended Tuesday evening's events, which featured an expanded variety of interactive educational booths for families to browse along with samples of food and other agricultural products from around the county. Visitors could watch a farrier shoe a horse, run their hands through a pile of wool from local sheep and plant their own "pizza garden" featuring tomatoes, green peppers, oregano and marjoram.
Easterday said the event was designed to help visitors equate the food and products they use every day with the activities of farms and other agricultural industries in the county.
Bill Lehman works in sales and customer service at Creighton Brothers. Lehman was one of more than 200 volunteers who made Ag Day possible.
"We come out here because we're a family-owned farm and we want to make sure we can promote that," Lehman said. "Even in an ag community, people can forget where their food comes from."
