Giving back more than just a ‘slogan’ for Amber Allyn

Cody Pate shares goat information with the crowd of local Posey County fifth-graders attending the Farm Fair on Tuesday, August 25. Photo by Dennis Marshall

By Dennis Marshall

Amber Allyn was a fifth-grader at Farm Fair once. This year she ran it.

Now 23 and a little more than a year into the Posey County Farm Bureau education and outreach job, Allyn led about 320 fifth-graders from every school in the county through livestock, a fertilizer rig, crop and timber talks, 4-H and a drone that sprays fields on Tuesday, Aug. 25.

“We really try to do a wide variety of things so that they get a good overall knowledge of agriculture and don’t just think it’s animals or just corn that they see in fields,” Allyn said. “We want them to realize that agriculture does touch their lives in multiple different ways.”

The variety was deliberate. Farm Fair gave students a look at agriculture from several different angles — the animals raised, the crops grown, the equipment and technology used to produce them, and the opportunities available to get involved.

Some students still cannot tell the county’s two largest crops apart, or that what leaves those fields is already headed for the feed bunk, the grocery aisle and the fuel tank.

“We have kids that come and they don’t know the difference between a corn and a soybean and everything that they can produce,” Allyn said. “Agriculture touches them every day in their life through food, fiber and fuel.”

Posey County Farm Bureau puts the day on. Board members work the stations. So do local farmers. Purdue Extension is in the rotation. Yunker Outdoor Power and Equipment brings the machinery. Black Township Fire & Rescue comes with a crew. Joe Marvel brings the drone he uses to spray crops. The co-op brought the fertilizer equipment it uses on local fields.

“We definitely couldn’t do it without them,” Allyn said.

For Ella Weinzapfel, the lesson started with the pigs.

The 11-year-old St. Wendel student was at Farm Fair for the first time. She is not in 4-H. At the pig station, the two piglets were the magnet. Kids lined up to hold them. The presenter made them hear the growth first: a few weeks old now, hundreds of pounds in a matter of months, some show pigs at the state fair much bigger than that, and the feed it takes to get there.

“I like the little pigs,” Weinzapfel said. “They’re so cute.”

Asked what else stood out, she went back to the animals.

“I liked, like, the animals,” she said. “Yeah, mostly the animals.”

Jessica Deardurff has been bringing St. Wendel fifth-graders on the trip for five years. She wants the animals in front of them. She also wants what sits behind them.

“It’s just really important for them to see how agriculture not only affects right here in Posey County and where they live, but also just how that globally expands out from there,” Deardurff said. “From opportunities that they have now to be a part of 4-H, as well as just getting to see how the livestock contributes to things as well as all of the different plants and even the drone and how that helps with the crops and things that we have around here.”

Farm Fair is often where the interest starts. Some join 4-H after the day. Some already in the program decide to take on a livestock project and exhibit.

“It definitely increases their interest and opens their eyes a little more,” Allyn said. “For some of them, that’s their first realization of anything of what agriculture is.”

She wants that work in classrooms too.

“We hope to continue to get into classrooms and reach down to the youth a lot more,” she said.