Taste of the Farm event in the books

The seventeenth annual Taste of the Farm event took place at the Waseca County Fairgrounds on Tuesday, June 3, thanks to the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture and the Waseca County Farm Bureau. The rain let up long enough for dinner inside the 4-H building, the line for which extended outside almost 60 deep at times, with plenty of little ones running around. Mary Jo Schoenfeld, office assistant to the Waseca County Farm Bureau, said more than 700 people showed up for the event. “We even ran out of milk,” she commented.

 

Outside on the fairgrounds, a cow and her calf, two sheep and a goat were available for children to pet in the livestock area. There were coloring projects, contests, and a word scavenger hunt to find information about the different ways corn can be used. Fun Facts: Pigs eat corn for energy and soybean meals for protein. With 87 counties in the state, Waseca County accounts for one percent of total Minnesota agricultural sales. Among its exports are products including grains, beans, peas, fruits, vegetables, hay, poultry, eggs, cattle, milk, hogs and sheep.

 

Gary Schoenfeld of the Waseca County Farm Bureau, who helped organize the day’s event said, “We purchased all our food through donations and grants; it’s the same every year. This will be the seventeenth year the Waseca County Farm Bureau has helped put this on, but for me this is only my seventh. We do everything we can to get the kids involved through this grassroots education.” Pointing at all the people, “How else will all this continue?”

 

Served during the event were 375 hamburgers and 375 pork patties. Ronald Spence and Dustin Schlaak were busy helping out by coating pork patties with Cookies BBQ Sauce over a charcoal grill. Not far from their smoky workstation, the burger men were also flipping burgers and checking temps. They pointed at the meat and said, “All this is from Neighbor’s Meats out of New Richland.”  The smoke from the grills could be seen from anywhere on the fairgrounds. Besides the meats, there were bags of chips, string cheese, milk, water and popcorn. For dessert there were root beer floats or M&M cookies.

 

Parked outside on the grounds between the drying puddles was green and yellow farming equipment, including a corn and soybean planter, a dry fertilizer air-seeder and a pull-behind chemical sprayer. Farm equipment was on loan from Kibble Equipment out of Owatonna and Gary Schoenfeld.

 

Additional projects for Farm Bureau Association are donations to food shelves, volunteer work at Farmamerica, and sometimes, when requested, visits to summer school. Said Schoenfeld, “We also help when things need to be changed in the Cities at the capitol, we’re just one chapter but we do what we can for our county and our residents.”