Despite being Ohio’s 4th fastest growing county, much of Fairfield County is still relatively rural. Yet, when the Bloom Carroll FFA Chapter invited nearly 100 of the county’s elementary school aged youth to attend the AGventure Summer Day Camp recently it was apparent many campers knew little about where their food actually comes from.
With the aid of a grant from the Ohio Beef Council along with support from local Government, civic organizations, local business and parents, campers received a week’s worth of agriculture based educational programming and supporting materials along with a healthy lunch created each day from the commodities commonly grown throughout the county.
Not only did Tuesday’s camp lunch feature beef fajitas, but Friday’s lunch was “stone soup” featuring a base of the fajita meat left from Tuesday’s camp meal. While the students enjoyed adding the leftovers from each day’s lunch to the beef based soup, they also saw each of the commodities they’d learned about during the week become another meal to enjoy.
The take home message for these young AGventure campers as well as their parents and the community members who observed was, “everything we eat and wear starts with agriculture!”