Taking the Farm to the School

Students Visit Mobile ‘Farm’
By JOSELYN KING
POSTED: March 30, 2009

Students at Ritchie Elementary School went "down on the farm" in South Wheeling recently as mobile vocational education came to them.

The West Virginia Farm Bureau Mobile Agriculture Education Science Lab was parked at the school last week, providing the young students with the opportunity to learn about scientific and environmental principles through hands-on experiments.

The students were coached on how to make plastic from corn starch, as well as lip balm from soybeans and beeswax. They also were schooled in the principles of problem solving and collecting data, and they learned what a "hypothesis" is.

Richie Elementary School's students come from what is largely an urban area of Ohio County. And Helen L. Hardman, coordinator of the mobile vocational lab, said it is the state Farm Bureau's intent with the lab to bring vocational science to children who don't live in farming areas.

"We developed it so that kids that live in the city can understand agriculture," she commented. "They're touched every day by agriculture - from the time they get up until they go to bed at night." Read More

As I mentioned earlier, the new battleground in the animal rights war is happening in our schools. HSUS and other groups have the goal of eliminating animal agriculture. In order to accomplish that they will have to fool the next generation into believing many myths about raising animals for food. So they have targeted our youth by creating school materials that cleverly disguise their true message. I have looked at some of their materials before and when the teachers have been asked about them, they didn’t have a clue about who the organization was or what they were trying to do. Congratulations to the West Virginia Farm Bureau for their hard work in educating kids about the importance of farming, ranching and food production in this country.