'Making a change': Hall students learn where their food comes from at Farm Camp
Jun. 15—Elementary students in Hall County spent the last day of Farm Camp chasing chickens and petting Denver the show cow at the school district's Agribusiness Center in north Hall on Thursday, June 15.
Just over 50 students in kindergarten through fifth grade attended the second annual Fun Farmer Academy, a four-day educational camp otherwise known as Farm Camp.
The goal of Farm Camp is "getting kids excited about agriculture," said Morgan Conner, the agriculture teacher at North Hall High. "We hatched this idea to have this camp where kids could do these hands-on activities."
Students learned about where dairy, beef and eggs come from, and also about the role of bees and other pollinators in producing honey. After spending the morning on the farm, they were bused back to North Hall High where they made pig ears out of construction paper and churned their own butter.
"My arm was so sore," said Lane Brewer, a second grader at Mount Vernon Exploratory School.
But when asked what was most fun about Farm Camp, it was almost unanimous: "Chasing the chickens!" the students said. Some even managed to catch one, clutching the bird in their arms with a proud smile on their faces.
Nora Herr, a second grader at Riverbend Elementary, said she also learned "to not hurt animals."
Conner said many of the students have hobby farms at home.
"A few days ago, one of them laid its first egg," Gracie Duckett, a first grader at Wauka Mountain Multiple Intelligences Academy, said of her chickens back home.
Studies show that many kids don't have a clue where their food comes from.
"Overall, children's knowledge of food production processes appears to be surprisingly limited," according to a study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology that asked 176 children ages 4-7 to identify whether common foods were derived from plants or animals.
Well over one-third of children believed that bacon, hot dogs and hamburgers came from plants, and nearly half of them said French fries came from animals.
"Even chicken nuggets, a food that has an animal in its name, were categorized as a plant-based food by more than a third of the children in our sample," the researchers said.
Both the Gainesville and Hall County school systems have tried to combat that trend with things like Farm Camp and events like Ag Day, an annual educational fair in the spring that teaches students about the food system.
Hall County Schools has also earmarked $8 million to build a meat processing center at the Agribusiness Center where high school students can learn to become butchers or meat scientists. The district also partnered with the University of Georgia last summer in establishing a program that allows seniors to dual enroll in agriculture courses at the university.
Bella Grier, a senior at North Hall High, could have spent her summer doing any number of things. Instead, she decided to spend a week on the farm as a camp counselor.
"I just really enjoy connecting with the kids and making a change," she said. "It's just a really great opportunity to teach them about agriculture at a young age, and we just hope to see them continue to be involved in agriculture through middle and high school."
