[March 20, 2019]      

An Agriculture Education Day was held by the Logan County Farm Bureau Young Leaders at the YMCA facility on Wyatt Avenue on Tuesday. Area fourth graders were led through different ways agriculture impacts their daily lives.

Throughout the day students moved from station to station learning about agriculture.

Outside, Sara Irwin worked from the back of a livestock trailer and showed the young people a calf. She and her family have a dairy farm in Logan County. Irwin explained that their farm has a refrigeration system to store the milk in and that Prairie Farms comes twice a week to collect the stored milk.

 

Not far from the diary display was the farm equipment display. The AHW dealership from New Holland offered a John Deere tractor and a planter. Central Illinois Ag of Atlanta brought in a Case-IH tractor. Red and Green isn’t just for Railers!

 

Indoors there were several stations highlighting the different components of Agriculture.

Students were divided into smaller groups as they learned about specific areas of agriculture and the role farming plays in our daily lives.

In one area, students learned about pork production and also about feeding the animals. Using a bag of trail mix as an example, kids learned about the different grains used to create hog feed and how the feed industry and the hog industry works to develop those products.

 

A second station offered kids the opportunity to make a sweet frozen treat to eat. Students were led in making ice cream using a zip lock bag with a mix of sugar, vanilla and half-and-half. They sealed the bag and mixed the ingredients and then put the bag a larger zip-lock of ice. The bags were squeezed and rolled around until the mixture was frozen into ice cream. Much of the focus on that station was relating to all the products that come from dairy.

 

Downstairs students were learning how to make bio-degradable plastic from Corn. It was explained how this is a more earth friendly product and utilizes corn which benefits farmers also. The young people really enjoyed this activity.