Jun. 5—For over 20 years, Wilson County Schools has been participating in what it calls “Farm Day,” a day of educating students on where food and other goods come from.

“We provide as comprehensive of an agriculture experience as possible for all second grade students in Wilson County,” Career and Technical Education Supervisor Bonnie Holman said.

Students who register for the event have 10-minute rotations at stations like animal exhibits, farm equipment, invasive insects and the Tennessee Department of Agriculture. In all, there were 30-40 different vendors for the students to visit.

“The students come for about two hours,” Holman said. “There’s a lot of exhibits and they don’t have time to make it through all of them, but they get exposed to a variety of facets of agriculture.”

The event, Holman says, helps students understand the importance of agriculture in their everyday life.

“As Wilson County continues to grow and we see farmland lost, we just get further away from generations that grew up on a farm and so students don’t understand where their food comes from,” Holman said.

As students load onto the bus to leave, Holman always makes a point of asking them what they learned.

“It’s nice to get to make those connections when they tell me, ‘Oh invasive bugs were my favorite,’ or the animals are always popular,” Holman said. “The sheep shearing demonstration was another thing that was popular because they get to see how that farmer takes the sheep, lays them down on the ground and sheers a whole sheep in less than three minutes. It gets its hair cut and it goes back to the pen.”

It takes about 120 volunteers to pull off the event for around 2,000 students.

“I think the big thing is just acknowledging the importance of agriculture and how agriculture has changed,” Holman said. “It’s not as much manual labor as you might have historically thought. It’s very mechanized and uses a lot of advancing technology.”

Prior to COVID-19, Holman said that the program ran independently from school districts through Wilson County Farm Bureau Insurance. After the pandemic, her predecessor wanted to bring the program back.

“Wilson County Farm Bureau does still sponsor the event and we partner with the Lebanon Special School District,” Holman said. “Since Farm Bureau sponsors it, it’s open to every student in Wilson County.”

In addition to public schools in the county, private schools like Friendship Christian in Lebanon are also invited to participate.

“I think it’s important that students are exposed to all the different aspects of agriculture and how diverse it is,” Holman said.