Michigan Ag in the Classroom Mobilizes Farm Science Labs for Students

Have lab, will travel!

Michelle Blodgett, Manager of Michigan Agriculture in the Classroom for Michigan Farm Bureau, showcased one of two labs to promote farm science at last week’s AgroExpo. Based at the Michigan Farm Bureau, the Michigan Agriculture in the Classroom put together two traveling farm science labs for students across the Great Lakes state.

“We are funded through the Michigan Foundation for Agriculture.  Some of our commodity groups and a lot of our county Farm Bureaus have helped put us together, see the need and the excitement in the program.  We started in 2017. In 2019 we added a second mobile lab. We travel all over the state; we’ve been up to the U.P., we’ve been all over lower Michigan. It was an idea that came from our promotion and education state committee. One of the programs is the farm science lab, we have two mobile labs that travel all over the state of Michigan, teaching our elementary students where their food comes from.”

Blodgett explains some of the exercises and lessons taught to Michigan students.

“Our kindergarten through 2nd grade programming is a thirty-minute lesson. We focus on where does your food come from? What products do we get from plants and animals that come from the farm? And highlighting that Michigan is number 2 in agricultural diversity and talking about the 300 different plus commodities that we grow and raise in Michigan.

3rd through 5th grade come out with their classroom teacher and they focus a fifty-minute lesson that focuses more on the commodities of Michigan; or soil, or water, and what farmers do to protect it. For example, if the kids come out and do our field plastic, that’s our corn lesson. They talk about polystyrene, to a corn packing peanut, knowing that it’s biodegradable and that’s it’s a renewable resource. And then we also talk about other products that are made from field corn. And at the end of the lesson, the kids get to do a make and take, and they make their corn plastic to take home to their families to hopefully share the story and what they learned in the lab.”

For more information, Blodgett says to reach out to your county Farm Bureaus, as well as the Michigan Agriculture in the Classroom website.

 

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