Celebrating Century Farms
Celebrating Century Farms. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.
A Century...100 years. Quite a milestone whether it’s someones age or how long a place has been in business. That applies to century farms as well. The American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture recently launched a new, interactive website devoted to the century farms.
MILLER: We wanted to somehow feature the long lasting heritage of America’s farms and ranches; to put a face to the farmer. There’s just something about a century farmer, someone whose been in there business for over a hundred years that that really speaks to the importance of family, local communities and sustainability.
That’s the Foundation’s Director of Education Curtis Miller who says there are three main interactive sections of the website.
MILLER: We have a great overview of century farms. The century farms finder is an interactive map, where all you need to do is click on your state and it takes it directly to the organization or the entity that keeps track of the century farms in your state. The profile section has both written profiles and video profiles which we are actually hoping to add more to. Finally the last section of the website is the American history and agriculture page. It’s actually an interactive timeline, about what’s going on in agriculture, going back to the 1800s to today.
Miller says there are many lessons on sustainability that any business in America could learn from century farms.
MILLER: Sustainability to us basically means, leaving that land, air, and water in a better condition for the next generation. The century farm is just a really good example of that because they have not only been doing this, but they’ve been doing it for more a hundred years.
He talks about educational resources available on “Agriculture’s Lasting Heritage”.
MILLER: Whenever we develop a resource, we always try to make sure that it meets the national learning standards because we know teachers have to be accountable to those. We develop lessons not necessarily focused on educating about agriculture, but education about what the teacher already needs to be teaching, Math, Social Sciences, Language Arts and History. We just happen to use agriculture as a subject manner. These lesson plans are laid out easy enough for anyone to go in and use in a classroom. We made them thought-provoking, hands on, and fun, so if a volunteer educator or teacher would like to use them it’s a done package ready to go activity.
If you’d like to check out the interactive resources on “Agriculture's Lasting Heritage” visit the website at www.agricultureslastingheritage.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.