Ag Day An Annual Delight
By Anthony Gadson
Pilot News PLYMOUTH�Third-gra-ders from across Marshall County were able to learn about all things agricultural on Thursday.
�We want to try to get the point across, how food comes from the raw form, to the processing plant and then the store,� Ag Day coordinator Helen Samuelson said.
�We want to show that the food doesn�t grow in the store.�
Students from 10 different schools convened in Centennial Park Thursday for the 13th Annual Ag Day in Plymouth.
�We feel that the third grade is a good one to get the students to come in and get an understanding of agriculture,� Sam-uelson said.
There were eight separate stations for the students to visit.
�A lot of people don�t know what agriculture is all about,� Marshall
County Extension
Agent Ralph Booker
said. �The third
grade is good,
because a lot of these kids have never seen some of the things here and may never again, like the sheep-shearing.�
Besides sheep-shearing, the students learned about swine, saw how cows produce milk and
learned about farm
safety.
For the dairy portion of the event, Rich Knebel brought his mobile dairy classroom, which contains a cow named Katey and a five-week old calf, Andy.
Knebel�s trailer goes all over Northern Indiana, teaching children about milk production. But children aren�t the only ones that get in on the fun.
�We do get a lot of questions from adults,� Knebel said. �Not many people are aware of what happens in between the time that the milk is produced to when the milk is sold to the consumer.�
The children learned a cow produces 32 gallons of milk and eats 100 pounds of feed each day. They also learned the cows are taken care of and not mistreated by farmers.
�Some people might think that we abuse that cows, but that�s not true at all,� Knebel said. �That�s your livelihood, so you�re going to watch out for the welfare and comfort of it.�
The students began planning for the Ag Day event in advance. Volunteers sent out instructions on how to grow small crops with the children�s school milk cartons.
�We send them out three or four weeks before Ag Day, so they can plant them and watch them grow,� Samuelson said. He calls it hands-on learning.
The students were treated to donated Dean�s Milk and pizza, which the volunteers try to correlate to agriculture.
�We tell them that pizza contains everything from agriculture,� Booker said. �There is the cheese, which is dairy, bread � that is, grain � and sausage, from the swine.�
Ag Day was produced with the help of donations. Local banks and agricultural groups donate funds to purchase the pizza.
�The students really seemed to enjoy seeing the sheep-shearing and also learned other things along the way,� Menominee teacher Carla Spier said.
�It was really fun to see all the things here,� said Menom-inee student Riley Drobitsch.
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