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From touching a cow’s liver and heart with their bare hands to learning how milk travels from a cow to their grocery store, fifth grade students from across the county will head home this weekend with stories about their time at a local dairy farm.
On Thursday, Belpre, Marietta and Fort Frye students toured the Schramm Dairy Farm in Reno with their peers to learn about crop rotation, the life cycle of female cattle and which products come from cows. Today Frontier, Waterford and Warren students will follow suit.
“I’ve learned a bunch of things like how the cow’s tongue is smooth on one side and on the other it’s really rough,” said Andrew Huffman, 10, of Marietta. “The inside of a heart is cool, when I squeezed it it kind of felt weird and blood came out.”
Students rotated between eight different stations at the farm Thursday, discovering both the smell and feel of cattle and learning the inner workings of a farm.
“Most of the children don’t come from farms so this lets them know where their milk comes from,” said Rick Schramm, the farm’s owner. “We want them to see the kind of care the animals have.”
Schramm’s wife, Theresa, manned the milking station where she explained to students how heifers are milked with special equipment that pumps the liquid directly into a holding tank without exposing it to air.
“It gets pumped through these pipes and never hits air so that germs don’t have a chance to get into it,” she explained to the captivated crowd.
The pair have welcomed the young crowd to their farm for more than a decade to gain an appreciation of where their food and household goods originate.
“I think it’s good for the kids to find out this stuff like where glue and band-aids come from,” said one parent chaperone, Jodi Whitehouse, 42, of Marietta. “A lot of these kids could read it in a book but it’s hands-on here.”
Hands-on came in many forms Thursday including interactions with young calves and active measure-
ment of corn kernels and soybeans.
“I got to touch all kinds of things,” said Huffman. “Baby calves are really very slimy.”
Kenzie Smith, 11, of Marietta, a student at Washington Elementary, said she was surprised by the feel of some of the organs.
“The tongue was disgusting and gushy,” she said. “And the heart was similar to ours but huge, but the liver was the weirdest. It felt like Jello.”
Christie Haines, a Lowell dairy farm owner, joined the educational event to explain the uses of the organs students touched.
“I teach them how agriculture and animals are used for so much more than food,” said Haines. “Its gelatin goes into candies and marshmallows and other byproducts go into things like candles and band-aids. It’s not gross-it’s just where things come from.”
Schramm said he hoped through their visit students learned how all facets of life are connected in some shape or form to a farm.
“Everybody’s connected to it,” he said. “It’s not just a farm. The milk goes to Broughton and then on to trucks to the grocery store and those are jobs to be filled just as much as on my land.”
Other topics exposed to the students included soil testing for crop growth, nutrition planning and how manure is used in the raising of crops.
“I hope they realize that we strive everyday to produce a quality product for them to purchase at their store,” said Schramm. “And that we do everything we can to keep our animals healthy, clean and happy.”