In late June 2014, Wolford kindergarten through second grade teacher Wanda Follman and fifth-sixth grade teacher Cathy Teubner attended the National Ag in the Classroom conference in Hershey, Pa. This year’s conference had the theme, “The Sweet Story of Agriculture.”

At the conference, Teubner and Follman had the opportunity to meet with educators from around the country. They also took in presentations that engaged educators on the topic of agriculture.

“We both feel it’s important to teach our students about the importance of healthy living, making healthy food choices as well as where our food comes from,” Teubner said in an email. “Both being married to farmers, we also want to expose students to the many career opportunities in the food and agricultural sciences.”

While neither previously attended a conference in Hershey, both teachers have completed Project Food, Land and People (FLP) courses offered by the North Dakota Farm Bureau. FLP is a 55-lesson curriculum made by educators for K-12 educators. Each lesson addresses Common Core content and North Dakota state standards with inquiry-based activities and defined sets of objectives. Lessons are on various topics, including soil and water conservation, nutrition, consumer science and agriculture’s impact on society.

One lesson Follman and Teubner plan to use in their classrooms focuses on eggs.

“Eggs have gotten a bad rap in the past,” Follman said. “In the morning they’re so quick and easy to make, they could be the next pop tart!”

FLP National Secretary Jill Vigesaa asked Teubner and Follman to apply for a Cenex Harvest States scholarship to attend the conference, and secured funds from the N.D. Department of Agriculture to make it happen.

While in Hershey, Teubner and Follman got a chance to tour Chocolate World and Hershey Park and Gettysburg. They took the opportunity to see a race horse breeding operation, a mushroom farm, an orchard/winery, an alpaca ranch and a trout farm.

“I always knew [Pennsylvania] was a dairy state, but it really surprised me that there were so many poultry farms,” Teubner said. “The size of the farms surprised me as well. We here are used to large grain farms with many acres, and the largest farms out there [are] about 300 acres.”