5th-Grade Farm Tour essay contest a yearly highlight
- John Lorson
- December 6, 2019
- 1075
December finally brings those of us here at Holmes Soil & Water to a moment when we can catch our breath and start sorting through the piles of stuff we’ve accumulated through the chaotic season that begins each year with the cover crop fly-on in early September, builds with the 5th-Grade Farm Tour, peaks with our annual district dinner and supervisor elections, and finally winds down with program sign-ups during the balance of November.
Each of these events overlays our day-to-day work of keeping soil in its place and keeping our waters clean.
I’m not going to lie: I have a favorite among all the varied duties that befall me here at Holmes Soil & Water. The week of our annual Tom Graham 5th-Grade Conservation Farm Tour is easily my favorite work week of the year. Not only is it fun for us to set up on a local farm or agribusiness site and teach about conservation to several hundred students “in the wild,” but also it’s a huge bang for the conservation education buck.
Kids remember things that are tied to experiences, and we see the event as the very best of opportunities to plant the seeds of conservation and good land-use practices.
One of the ways in which we gauge our success in this endeavor is by hosting an annual writing contest. The essays we receive give us an incredibly vivid look into the minds of our student guests. The lessons that “stick” bubble to the surface and help us work toward making and even better event the following year. The rules allow for a “creative nonfiction” approach in the students’ writing. In this way, rather than simply receiving facts and figures from the trip, we can see how the kids frame the lessons in their own heads.
I, along with a trusty group of judges including writers and retired teachers, get the chance to read them all. It’s a dream job, really. Let’s look at this year’s winners.
William Moan, a student of Elizabeth Sommers at Walnut Creek Elementary, told the story of the farm tour through the eyes of a young bird whose teacher was temporarily incapacitated by an in-flight collision with a tree. Forced to learn on his own, “Eddy” was impressed with our Rainfall Simulator demonstration, ultimately declaring, “I made a mental note to only drink from underground streams that are beneath pastures with rotational grazing because their infiltration is clean.” Now that’s a lesson learned and a third-place prize earned.
Olivia Miller’s second-place story was told from the perspective of “Timothy,” a young mouse living under a haystack. Faced with a huge influx of fifth-graders one day on the farm, he followed along to see what he could learn. Timothy especially enjoyed the wildlife presentation until the teacher held up a chart of a wildlife food web. The impressionable young rodent exclaimed, “I was horrified to find myself at the bottom.”
Timothy’s day took a turn for the better with another revelation: “There are 75,000 tons of Swiss cheese made in Ohio every year. I’m hungry now.”
Miller is a student of Sommers at Walnut Creek Elementary.
Our first-place entry was penned by Cheston Cooper, a student of Lauren Mosher at Lakeville Elementary. Cooper’s “Gunter,” the curious groundhog, had to watch his back as he followed the kids from station to station on the farm tour. As a great pilferer of soy beans, he knew he was not among the farmer’s favorite creatures.
Gunter was comfortable with his place in the soil profile, however, and explained, “My groundhog friends and I live in the topsoil. Sometimes our burrows go down to the subsoil, but we can’t dig down in the parent material because of the bedrock.”
The bean thief made it to the end of the tour by hiding behind fence posts.
Thanks again to all the folks who helped make this year’s Tom Graham 5th-Grade Conservation Farm Tour a success; and a special thanks to the students who entered our essay contest as well as the teachers who guided them.