CRAVEN, Sask. – Midway through a tour to familiarize Saskatchewan teachers with animal agriculture, they sounded like old farmers as they debated the tastiness of different sheep breeds.
A tour of Richard Strauss’ Katahdin sheep farm, followed by Leitch’s Livestock sheep feedlot, contrasted the merits of wool and meat sheep for them.
The straw poll seemed to favour the Katahdin meat as milder and less “woolly” tasting.
However, the group also acknowledged the arguments of the feedlot staff, that the wool sheep gained more weight and were the preferred size for the mainly American customers.
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The July 7-9 tour through east-central Saskatchewan also took the group of 10 teachers to a dairy farm, a welding business, a community pasture and an auction market.
It was the first tour of its type organized by the provincial Agriculture in the Classroom group, said program manager Clarice Springford. Since 1996, the group has held a summer workshop to show the industry to teachers and get them to write resource materials to incorporate farm examples into classroom lessons.
“Teachers are amazing at finding connections with math, science and even English,” said Springford.
“They have to be creative because there is no agriculture course as such offered in schools.”
This farm tour will be repeated next year, said Springford.
“The teachers called it exciting, wonderful, terrific. They really had a good time.”
Future tours will cover other geographic areas and different types of agriculture, she said. Springford also hopes the number of teachers participating builds from a vanload to a busload.
Hudson Bay, Sask., high school teacher Mike Gorkoff said his goal on the tour was to get some contact names and new information at a level accessible for his Grade 9 students. He teaches them agriculture and each spring they hold an Agribition type event to show off their new knowledge. However, Gorkoff said it’s getting harder to find information that is not at the advanced university level, which even he finds difficult to understand.
“To me, agriculture is the backbone of Canada. It’s too bad the federal government is not recognizing that.”
Knowing about the industry is less of a problem for Lindsay McJannet, who will be teaching high school grades as an intern in Eston, Sask., in September. She already has an agriculture degree and is working on her bachelor of education degree. For her, the tour was an opportunity to mix with experienced teachers.
“I’m getting lots of tips from them.”
Beth Campbell, a teacher from Saskatoon who is writing up the resource manual from the tour, said she “absolutely” learns from every stop on the tour. Unlike most Saskatchewan teachers who may come from a farm or have a brother or sister who still farms, Campbell is from an Ontario city.
