Farm Credit Canada

Canadian kids can tell you who Eminem is and list five of his big hits, but many can’t tell you where milk comes from.

“The average Canadian child knows very little about agriculture,” Lindsay Babineau, Executive Director, BC Agriculture in the Classroom Foundation (BCAITC) says. “That’s significant because we all need to protect our agricultural resource base. Fewer and fewer people are involved in agriculture and more and more people are eating. This will pose a problem in the future if our society doesn’t understand the importance of sustainable agriculture and food systems.”

One solution is better education.

“The food choices you make can impact your local economy, neighbours, province and country,” Babineau says. “People don’t care where their food comes from, but as children and teachers become aware, they also start to understand that they can have an effect on what’s happening around them.”

To educate students and help teachers lead the way, Ontario Agri-Food Education, Farm Credit Canada, Agriculture in the Classroom (AITC) and other provincial AITC organizations are partnering to release the third edition of All About Food: Agri-Food Facts. This resource introduces the world of agriculture to students in a real way by making it relevant. 

The resource includes a Teacher’s Guide, filled with great lesson plans and activity ideas, and a Farm Visit Guide so you get the most out of those field trips. The resource is free and available at www.aitc.ca.

Teaching agriculture in the classroom can be more than sharing how to grow crops and raise livestock; it’s an excellent way to illustrate how agriculture plays a major role in our economy, how it affects connected industries and uses resources. It teaches unique science, business, health, history and social sciences lessons.

Teaching children where our food comes from
One of the programs BCAITC uses is the Dairy Classroom. A dairy cow and calf are brought right to the school. The calf is fed out of a huge nursing bottle and the cow is milked right in front of the students. This hands-on experience connects children with agriculture in a real way—and it’s fun.

“When children make the connection between milk and where it comes from, the result is magic,” Babineau says. “The dairy farmers thought the children would never drink milk again, but the result was completely the opposite. The children all said ‘thank you’ to the cows and drank their carton of milk.”

Other teaching tips to help children understand where their food comes from:

• Have kids “audit” what they eat at home over a couple of days and then learn where that food is produced, how much their family spends on it and compare that information with other countries.
• Build a mini greenhouse and grow a plant from seed.

Teaching children about food
Our culture is centred on fast food and convenient snacking. Store shelves are filled with pre-packaged, highly processed food that is high in fat and low in fibre. Teaching children about proper food choices can help them lead healthier lifestyles.

Some AITC ideas to teach children about healthy food choices:

• To teach younger children about proper serving sizes, use plasticine to create models of proper servings of the different food groups.
• Children can look for food in their home that contains fat found naturally or that has been added in processing.
• Have students complete a food record to evaluate their eating habits, then write a report providing recommendations on how to improve.

Teaching children what food costs
It used to be called milk money. Now that money goes toward vending machines, fast food outlets and convenience food items. In fact, the average Canadian spends about 30 per cent of their food budget at the restaurant.¹

Canadians enjoy some of the highest quality food at the lowest costs in the world. “Local food is cheaper and better than imported food,” Babineau says. “It’s fresher for us and helps keep our farms alive.”

Great idea starters for teaching what food costs:

• Younger children can figure out how much their family spends on food in a week, month and year. Set up a “grocery” and give the children a set amount to spend.
• Have older children develop a budget for their family’s food expenditure for one week.
• Ask older students to investigate economic factors that determine food costs in Canada.

Conclusion
Do you know which of these products have ingredients that come from Canadian farms: crayons, makeup, car polish, wallpaper, paint, shaving cream or footballs? If you answered yes to all of these products, you’re correct. Even parts of disposable diapers are made from corn.

Offering All About Food: Agri-Food Facts to students ensures that the next time they pass cows on the way to the cottage, they’ll know more than what sound they make—they’ll know the food they create.

Sidebar:
Quotes from children who had just learned about agriculture*:

• I didn’t know there was a special vacuum for milking cows
• I learned that we should be drinking 3-4 cups of milk a day (does ice cream count as a serving of milk?)
• I learned you can make pigs into bacon
• I learned that not all cows are not for milking, some are for beef (to eat)
• I learned that there are worms that live in a kind of soil called topsoil
• I learned that a cow costs $1,500
• I learned that roosters don’t lay eggs

* Provided by BC Agriculture in the Classroom

¹ Taken from All About Food: Agri-Food Facts. Out of the $123.76 the average Canadian spends on food in a week, $37.52 goes toward restaurant food.