Connecting Youth to Agriculture

By Nichole Gouldie, Communications Specialist

While farm fields are common sights around the predominately rural state we live, many students today aren’t attuned to agriculture. Although no one can discount the thousands of hours and hundreds of people who work diligently to spread the positive message about agriculture, there are still many young minds to educate.

At Grammy’s Pumpkin Patch, straw hats and chickens are common sites seen by

second grade students that visit Johnstown Farm.

For the fourth year, second grade students from McPherson elementary schools participated in Grammy’s Pumpkin Patch "In the Class and On the Farm" agricultural education program.

"For so long, I was taking our family’s farmstead south of Lindsborg for granted," says Laura Mourn, education coordinator at Grammy’s Pumpkin Patch. "Educators at heart, my mom, sister and I made it our mission to come up with a fun way to connect students with the farm."

Started in 2011, the family spearheaded the addition of the classroom element to their already two and a half acre pumpkin patch that welcomed visitors to the farm each fall.

The program is two-fold, Mourn says. The first part brings sisters and coordinators Angie Flippo and Mourn into the second grade classrooms. "These hands-on lessons are a basic introduction of the "what" and "why" of Kansas agriculture," she says.

In the classroom setting, students learn an age appropriate definition of agriculture. The definition all classes learn and recite is "agriculture is the process of preparing the soil to grow crops and livestock." The traditional classroom lesson prepares students to visit the farm.

"Most of the students don’t realize how agriculture affects them in their everyday life," Mourn explained. "We start with what the students ate that morning for breakfast or how they got to school, and almost always we can relate it back to agriculture."

Mourn added the second part of the program is a day at Johnstown Farm where students experience lessons in the core content areas taught through the lens of agriculture.

"Our lessons are in math, language arts, science and other basics, using curriculum emerged in agriculture," Mourn commented. "As an educator, I love the hands-on, real-life experience for the students."

For example, a lesson in math is taught talking about how a farmer isn’t going to count the number of seeds they will plant, instead they will estimate.

Mourn says because of sponsored support from MKC and other organizations, Grammy’s Pumpkin Patch was able to welcome nine second grade classes to the farm. In 2014, Grammy’s Pumpkin Patch reached 191 second graders.

"No matter the agricultural learning experience, hopefully the students will talk about the field trip at home, and that will in turn interest their parents and siblings," Mourn says.

All efforts made to educate youth help re-establish connections which once existed because farming was in everyone’s close family. Today that is not the case, making the need to teach about where food really comes from an increasingly important part of education.

MKC believes it is important, if not critical, for people to continue to have an idea about where their food comes from. "It is not a good thing if people believe milk comes from a carton," says Jeff Jones, MKC location manager at Haven. "Not recognizing a cow is ultimately responsible for milk production is not completely uncommon when we visit schools."

That is where MKC’s "Ag Everyday" presentation derived from. The presentation, developed for fourth grade students, discusses what grain is, what major grains are grown in Kansas, where the grain goes and what the grain is used for. To wrap up the presentation, MKC employees put together a "felt pizza" with the students and discuss where the ingredients come from. After putting together the "pretend" pizza, students get to enjoy a real slice of pizza.

"For kids, pizza is often a preferred food. And within a pizza, much of what farming supplies can be seen," Jones says. "The simple pizza in many ways encapsulates the variety of agricultural and food production into something all students can relate to."

Like many employees, Jones enjoys seeing the excitement in the classroom when the students make those real connections to agriculture. More than 75 presentations have been made by MKC employees since the program began in the fall 2012 by Shane Eck, MKC location manager at Lindsborg.

Grammy’s Pumpkin Patch and "felt pizzas" are certainly efforts which are on the right track to spread the positive message about agriculture.