Farmamerica offering student field trips

More than 600 school-age learners have visited Farmamerica over the past two weeks as part of field trips arranged by their schools at the Waseca facility. Schools have included Janesville-Waldorf-Pemberton, New Ulm, Northfield and Rochester; one day was set aside for area home schools. Students ranged from between 7 and 14 years old.

 

To make the field trips possible, staff members explain, they rely on help from volunteers who staff the individual sites, share information and lead activities. Most days there were 18 volunteers helping–14 at the various locations and 4 individuals driving the trams that transported groups of students and chaperones between them. Student groups are advised to bring their own lunches, so food service is not necessary.

 

Field trips are concentrated in the relatively short windows of time in the fall and spring when students are in school and the weather and conditions are conducive to being outdoors.

 

According to executive director Jessica Rollins and communications and engagement coordinator Morgan Mudgett, Farmamerica charges $5 per student for the tours. Rollins mentions field trips have been offered for more than 20 years.  Farmamerica, she points out, opened in 1978 and has been gradually expanding ever since. She recalls that during some of the earliest field trips, the facility’s one-room schoolhouse was where groups of children would first gather and receive instructions for the day. 

 

Volunteer Larry Olson, 74, enjoys staffing the 1930s farmstead site where animals including market hogs, a pot-bellied pig, chickens, and the presidentially pardoned turkeys Peach and Blossom are kept.

 

He estimates maybe five percent of the children who arrive on the site have spent any time on farms or had experience with livestock or poultry. One detail he persistently notices is that children seem to expect pigs “to be soft and furry like a dog,” and so are very surprised by the sparse, wiry hairs that are actually the case.

 

He also mentions the two tom turkeys “always put on a good show,” puffing themselves up in true territorial style as groups of children gather. When they visit the chicken coop, he says, children are surprised to learn hens can act as living “incubators” for their eggs.

 

“It’s a lot of fun to see the difference between what they expect and what they find out is reality,” comments Olson.

 

At the one-room schoolhouse, students spend half their 30 minutes at the site walking through the schoolroom and seeing what a typical day was like, and half their time trying out recess games that include sack races, walking on wooden stilts, and playing traditional games.

 

Farmamerica staff members note that the field trips are an ideal way to carry out the organization’s goal of educating people about the ways agriculture has supported the growth and expansion of society and technology.