Ag News
ABAC, GFB partner in Destination Ag project
Posted on Aug 21, 2017 at 20:00 PM
Tracy Ingram herds her class of kindergarten students onto the bus early one morning. Twenty students trembling with excitement peek eagerly out the window and ride the short distance from Len Lastinger Primary School to the Georgia Museum of Agriculture. The bus arrives and the doors hiss open as the children pour out to be greeted by students from Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College.
Both college and kindergarten students are eager to begin the day with Destination Ag, a dynamic, hands-on educational program connecting students and teachers to the importance of agriculture and natural resources in their daily lives.
As a teacher at Len Lastinger and member of the Destination Ag Advisory Committee, Ingram gets to see the program come full circle from its early planning stages to the way it impacts her kindergarten class.
"The kids had a fantastic time, and I don't think they really felt like they were going through a lesson. They got to do some really fun stuff, and they discovered the content," Ingram said as she discussed the push from the state level encouraging inquiry based instruction. She went on to say that the program is "tied directly to our standards, so there's no question about if it meets our needs." One of the foundations of the Destination Ag program has been a focus on teacher involvement from the beginning.
Thanks to an initial gift of $250,000 from the Harley Langdale Jr. Foundation to the ABAC Foundation, the Destination Ag program at ABAC opened its doors to pre-k through first grade students in Tift, Colquitt, and Cook counties in September 2016 and has served more than 5,000 children in its first year.
"ABAC and the staff of the Georgia Museum of Agriculture exceeded our expectations during the inaugural year of Destination Ag's operation," said Donnie Warren, executive director of the Harley Langdale Jr. Foundation. "They are raising the bar for agriculture and natural resources education in our area."
Each lesson aims to be an engaging experience the class will never forget.
"All of our six learning stations with Destination Ag are interactive," Garrett Boone, director of the Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village at ABAC, said. These stations cover curriculum based plant and animal information, as well as the careers associated with agriculture and natural resources.
One of the things that makes this program unique is its agriculture and natural resource career focus, for both the young participants and the ABAC student instructors. It exposes Georgia's youth early on to the career possibilities in the ag industry. It also gives ABAC students, who are mostly ag communication majors, ag education majors, diversified ag majors, or rural studies majors, the opportunity to try their hand at a teaching career.
"I have changed my major to ag education since I worked with Destination Ag," said Sara Prokosch, one of the ABAC student instructors. "Even if I don't start out teaching, a new career goal of mine is to be the best advocate for agriculture that I can be no matter where God takes me in life."
Ingram recalled a particular lesson that illustrated a standard her kindergarten students had been studying in class - the characteristics of living things. She bragged on the ABAC student instructor who took the time to indicate the differences between the chickens the students saw and the mule they interacted with, pointing out that one had babies from an egg while the other had live babies.
"He really got into the characteristics of the animals, and man that really stuck with them. They were talking about it."
Destination Ag was created when there was a realization that ag and natural resource literacy, even in such an agriculturally based area, was alarmingly low.
Ingram sees this first hand from her class' idea of the forestry industry.
"They see trees as something almost like an endangered species, and they're worried, desperately worried, about people cutting down trees. The importance here that I see is that trees are a renewable resource. Something we need to conserve, not preserve. We don't need to stop anybody from ever cutting down a tree. We need to make sure when one is cut down more are planted."
Steve McWilliams, a former president of the Georgia Forestry Association and now a consultant to the Harley Langdale Jr. Foundation remarked, "If we educate our young people today, they will be better prepared as adults to make decisions and support policies that promote and encourage agriculture, forestry, and other natural resource industries."
With the success of the program in its first year, the Harley Langdale Jr. Foundation expressed its appreciation on June 5 by committing $1 million over the next four years to continue the program.
"Through this additional support from the Harley Langdale Jr. Foundation, ABAC will continue to plant seeds that will ensure the growth of Georgia's number one industry, agriculture, for the next generation and beyond," ABAC President David Bridges said. "This support has made it possible for us to invest in the lives of these students who will one day be the agricultural leaders of this state."
McWilliams also sees an opportunity to partner with other organizations that share a passion for agriculture.
"The Destination Ag staff and the staff at the Georgia Farm Bureau are actively engaged in combining their strengths to improve the curriculum of the program and increase access across the state," said McWilliams. One of those projects is a series of Traveling Ag Trunks that will be available starting in the fall of 2017 for Georgia Farm Bureau (GFB) volunteers to take into their local schools for a Destination Ag lesson.
"The Traveling Trunks will be a great addition to the already strong Ag in the Classroom program supported by GFB," added McWilliams.
"Georgia Farm Bureau has coordinated Georgia's Ag in the Classroom initiative for more than 30 years with our county volunteers and staff members visiting schools to teach students about Georgia agriculture," GFB President Gerald Long said. "We are proud to partner with the Harvey Langdale Jr. Foundation and Destination Ag program to use the Traveling Trunks to educate primary students across the state about Georgia's timber producers and the products, such as houses and paper products, made from the trees they grow."
In the upcoming school year, the Destination Ag program will expand, continuing to serve the original three counties and adding Berrien County and second grade to the agenda. By 2021 Destination Ag will develop to also involve Irwin, Turner, Ben Hill and Worth counties, all the way up to 5th grade with more than 17,000 children participating annually.
Destination Ag ends each lesson with an evaluation on which teachers are encouraged to give feedback, staying true to its teacher involvement from beginning to end.
"One thing that we don't generally get that we did get from Destination Ag is continued input from educators. The questionnaire asked: What do you want? What did you think about this? How did this work for you? What do you want us to change? That's huge," said Ingram.
As the students' day at the Georgia Museum of Agriculture ended, and the eager kindergarteners slumped against the bus windows for the ride back to school, Ingram is reminded why she loves education. She knows that when these students reflect on their year in kindergarten, they might not remember the worksheets and crafts, but they will always remember their day with Destination Ag.
Ginger Orton is an intern in the Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College's Office of College Advancement and an active Schley County Farm Bureau Young Farmer member.
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