Like most people, I have a love-hate relationship with social media. But this is one time of year I really enjoy browsing posts from my group of friends, especially those in agriculture. It’s fair time! I can almost smell the fresh wood chips of the show ring and the aroma of deep-fried everything as I scroll through post after post.

I have fond memories of attending my local county fair as a child and teen. It was a sizeable fair with barns full of livestock, several exhibition buildings, so much good food you could hardly sample it all in four days.

As someone who spent a lot of time in the barns during the fair, I could always pick out the “city kids” when they came through the barn – they would laugh about the sounds and smells. I didn’t think anything about this at the time, but now, I wonder – do the city kids even make their way over to the barns anymore?

Fast forward a few years and a generation, and my kids are city kids. Before my oldest daughters were in elementary school, they did get a small taste of farm life, as we lived on a small farm in Kansas and they even got to show a few sheep. They are also exposed to my work on a regular basis, so I feel confident that they are remaining connected enough to agriculture to know where their food comes from. Their friends, not so much.

There just aren’t enough opportunities to expose non-farm kids to agriculture. Even in my daughters’ school district in southeast Iowa, we had to fight this past year to implement an Introduction to Agriculture class. My daughters and their friends are more likely to learn about where their food comes from by watching Food, Inc. in a health class than they are to gain any real understanding about the agricultural food system. If they don’t have access to this education in Iowa, how can we expect anyone outside of the Midwest to have any chance?

In a country where most people are two to four generations removed from the farm and less than 2% of the population is employed in farming, how do we educate the masses?

Not a day goes by that I don’t see a new challenge to our agricultural systems and the hardworking farmers who have spent a lifetime taking care of their families and thousands of others with the fruits of their labor. These challenges come from a myriad of places - government, special interest groups, philanthropic activists, local moms’ groups. The one thing that many of them have in common is no connection to the farm or how their food is produced. No personal experience with agriculture and, unfortunately, little desire to learn.

So, back to that Ag curriculum. The district approved its inclusion for next school year, but the class has already been canceled at my daughters’ high school. Not enough students enrolled (my junior and freshman may, in fact, have been the only ones). They really just did it for me, not because of a true interest. While we certainly can’t require that students take a separate class to learn about where their food comes from, there has to be a way to infuse facts about our industry into basic curriculum. Health, social studies, and science and technology classes would be obvious choices.

Ultimately, it comes down to figuring out how we are going to connect with this generation, the next generation, and the generation after that. As we get farther and farther away from a direct connection to the farm, the likelihood of the city kids coming to walk through the barns at the fair gets less and less.

We have to come up with some creative ways to reach them. And soon…before another generation goes by.

It’s fair time; where are the city kids?

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