Ag Day gives sixth graders insight into a key aspect of Lenoir County’s economy and lifestyle
Hannah Howe, right foreground, the field crop extension agent in Greene County, and Rachel Tarkington, the field crop agent in Lenoir County, give LCPS sixth graders a hands-on lesson about the state’s different soil types during the county’s first-ever Ag Day this week.
How do cows and pigs contribute to medical care? What’s the recipe for photosynthesis? Why are green plants green? How do snakes hear? If you’re stumped, ask the 600 LCPS sixth graders that turned out to learn this week at Lenoir County’s first-ever Ag Day.
Held Tuesday and Wednesday at the Lenoir County Livestock Arena, Ag Day brought students from all four LCPS middle schools together with more than a dozen experts whose interestingly illustrated lessons aligned with agriculture’s prominence in Lenoir County’s economy, with the state’s sixth-grade curriculum and with the schools’ on-going effort to introduce young people to occupations available in the area.
“This is a way to get everyone involved in agriculture,” said Pamela Pate, a career development specialist with LCPS, noting the event meshed with middle schools’ connection with FFA and their FFA-inspired ag classes. “Lenoir County is a rural, agricultural county, but people often don’t realize what a difference agriculture makes in their everyday life.”
That purpose prompted Lenoir Soil and Water to float an idea that soon found planning partners in LCPS and the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service as well as a roster of presenters that included the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality, Lenoir County Master Gardener Volunteers, Neuseway Nature Park, Smithfield Foods, Onslow County Beekeepers and farm equipment dealer B&S Enterprises, among others.
“We wanted these students to have a field trip that would give them a lot of their curriculum with hands-on experiences,” said Paige Petticrew, consumer horticulture extension agent in Lenoir County. “We went through their curriculum and identified their hot topics, the ones that were utilized the most, and from there we just reached out to people we thought could fill those spaces.”
Hannah Howe, the field crop extension agent in Greene County, and Rachel Tarkington, the field crop agent in Lenoir County, talked to students about the different types of soil in North Carolina, the benefits of cover crops and the different crops that are grown in Lenoir and Greene counties. Along the way, they cleared up any questions about corn.
“A lot of them can’t believe that field corn is real,” Tarkington said. “They think it’s fake, that it’s plastic. They can’t believe there’s feed corn for animals and the sweet corn that we eat.” At their station, students could literally get a feel for soil types, touch a sample of cover crops and see a cob of field corn for themselves.
Science class was in session when Jeannie Holmes, a Lenoir County Master Gardener, turned the chemical process of photosynthesis into a recipe, illustrated by a couple of custom-made giant plants – Plantzilla and her younger brother – who cooked up a batch of a plant’s essential food, combining sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to create oxygen and energy in the form of glucose. “The plant scrubs the carbon dioxide from the air and gives back oxygen,” Holmes said. “And where would we be without oxygen?”
With the help of a model cow and a model pig, family consumer science agents Kelly Tyndall and Velvet Tyndall acquainted students with farm animals and their contributions to the dinner table and beyond.
“Today’s focus was looking at the animals most people raise in Lenoir County and showing children how important they are to everyone,” Kelly Tyndall said. “Not only do provide food for us, but they also provide other products that we touch every single day.”
A case in point: her husband’s heart is now doing its job thanks to a pig value. “The students were really shocked by that, knowing that there is a human that I live with who has an animal part.”
Ag Day was designed to give sixth graders eye-opening moments, according to Brittany Harrison, the career development coordinator in the school district’s Career and Technical Education program.
“I think the biggest thing for the students is to see what kind of opportunities they have in their community, things they can be involved in as a student as well as future career options that they have,” Harrison said. “Ag Day exposes them to things they can do while they’re young and in the future, too, particularly when they get to high school and can take classes in horticulture and animal science and other CTE courses.”
By design, the county’s first Ag Day premiered during National Agriculture Week and will continue to be a local feature of that national observance, according to Janine Lloyd, director of Lenoir Soil and Water.
“North Carolina is now the No. 1 state in the loss of agricultural land,” Lloyd said. “To me it just made more and more sense to bring something like Ag Day to our schools so that we can emphasize the importance of agriculture to the students.”
