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Farm Field Days educates local kids about agriculture
Who doesn't like a good field trip?Fourth-grade students from 16 schools across the county, gathered at the Prince William Fairgrounds last Tuesday and Wednesday for one-on-one time with livestock and farmers.
The children, who included students from Cedar Point Elementary and Linton Hall School in Bristow, learned a little about life on the farm.
About 800 kids over two days rotated in and out of events like the horsepower-to-high-tech pull and model cow milking. The exercises taught them about where their food comes from, but also about science concepts like kinetic and potential energy.
Local farmer Jay Yankey, whose family volunteered at the event for the seventh year in a row, said one of his favorite aspects of Farm Field Days is being "able to expose them to something that's new that's so vital to their existence and life.
"It's neat to show them that relationship that they may have never considered before," he said.
For instance, groups of students pulled a metal base on cinder blocks at one of Yankey's stations as part of a demonstration about how to calculate horsepower. At another station, his dad brought in tractors from the 1910s and 1950s to help explain the evolution of farming throughout the last century.
Yankey's wife Sonja also milked a model cow that came from Yankey Farms in Nokesville. Even though the cow was not real, some of the kids were scared to touch it just because they are not regularly exposed to livestock.
"That would be the biggest thing that I would be surprised about, they don't know that a cow is milked twice a day because they're so far removed from the farm," said Sonja Yankey, who is the local dairy inspector.
Students who wanted to see the real thing got a chance to do so alongside other animals provided by local farmers and the animal shelter. A donkey, goats, horses, rabbits, sheep, llamas, ducks, chickens, miniature goats, pigs and alpacas were among some of the other farm creatures kids could see up close. In turn, the onlookers brought donations for the local shelter, like towels and dog food.
The event, hosted by the Prince William Soil and Water Conservation District, runs on a $6,000 budget and is operated largely by volunteers, according to the district's education specialist, Joan Patterson.
"[It's] free to the schools," she said. "They only thing they have to pay for is their transportation."
While this year had the most number of students since the event began in 1989, organizers found ways to cut costs, like supplying volunteers with bandannas instead of t-shirts.
The PW Farm Club, which manages the fairgrounds, allows the district to host the event free of charge.
Patterson said one of the biggest challenges for volunteers and staffers is managing all the kids. That's where help comes in from 40 high school students at Stonewall Jackson.
Twenty Raider students and about two or three teachers each day took a day off from school to help coordinate the trash-free lunch events. Along with collecting all the trash and recycling from lunches, they figured out average amounts of waste to determine the winner for the lowest amount of trash generated per class on each day.
Stonewall and Osbourn Park students also helped out with basic coordinating once the kids began arriving each day at 10 a.m.
Some volunteers, like the Yankeys, routinely show up each year. Then then there is Gracie Shepard, who has been there consistently throughout the program's 20-year run that only halted in 2002 during the sniper attacks.
"I think we're just going to keep doing the same things and educating different students next year," said Jay Yankey about his family's future goals for the program.
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