Sue Sitter/PCT Ely Elementary School students watch Rugby High School FFA member Jaclyn Ducscher point out information on pizza cheese from a chart. Also presenting the dairy lesson are, from left, Adison Dosch and Allison Selensky.

The North Dakota Farm Bureau, Pierce County Farm Bureau, and Rugby High School FFA teamed up to bring a fun and tasty lesson to Rugby fourth graders at Memorial Hall on March 30.

With help from FFA members, the NDFB set up display tables devoted to pizza ingredients to show students from Ely and Little Flower elementary schools how their favorite food comes from farms.

The program, called Special Assignment: Pizza, is available through the North Dakota Farm Bureau and county farm bureaus throughout the state for use in North Dakota schools.

Each display in Memorial Hall taught the students fun facts not even many North Dakota residents know.

At one booth, Rugby High FFA member Austin Dibble taught the fourth graders a lesson on honey. Dibble said North Dakota tops all states in the USA in honey production.

“Have any of you been driving around with your parents and you’ve seen those really yellow fields?” Dibble asked the elementary schoolers.

“Those are canola fields and if you’ve seen boxes like this, what those do is (house bees) to pollinate all those flowers,” Dibble explained.

Dibble told the students honey enhances the flavor of pizza crust and sauce.

At another booth, FFA members quizzed the fourth graders on dairy facts.

“How much does the average dairy cow weigh?” Allison Selensky asked the students.

After the students visited the displays, they played a combination trivia and bean bag toss game, with help from FFA Officers Katelyn Duchscher and Ryan Slaubaugh.

“They’re so excited about this,” Ely Fourth Grade Teacher Kristen Heilman said of her pupils.

Heilman and fellow teachers Lindsey Bush and Liisa Foster all walked to Memorial Hall from Ely Elementary with their fourth-grade classes. Teacher Nancy Follman walked with her combination third and fourth grade class from Little Flower School.

“I’m a family rancher, so I love that we’re bringing agriculture into the classroom,” Heilman said. “The sooner we can advocate for ag and the younger the students are, the longer (the lessons) will take them and the more they’ll realize where their food comes from.

“So many kids think their food comes from a grocery store,” Heilman added. “They don’t see the agriculture part.”

Heilman said farmers and ranchers are “very concerned about environmental issues. Agriculture can help sustain the environment.

“And people don’t realize the better you take care of animals, the better the product you’re going to have and the more money you’ll make,” she added. “You can’t profit off a poor-quality animal and poor animal husbandry.”

Heilman said she’s taught kindergarten and fourth grade at Ely “and I’ve always done an ag unit to show that it’s important to our state and our entire nation.

“We talk about where food comes from, where our grain comes from; we do a calving unit, because right now, cows are calving and the kids love to see the baby calves,” she said. “We also hatch chicks and bring the baby chicks to my place.”

“Any little bit of agriculture you can fit in (classrooms), the kids love it so much,” Heilman added. “That’s what the kids are engaged in and that’s what they like to learn about, so it means a lot.”

Heilman said her students react with enthusiasm to ag in their classroom “because maybe it’s something they haven’t been introduced to before. That’s nobody’s fault; it’s just that everyone has their own journey of life. So, every little bit of advocacy you can have for the ag industry is awesome.”

Follman said her students were excited about the pizza lesson as well.

“They were all excited because they were here as third graders, because they’re in a combined classroom. So, as third graders, they got to come here and it’s a lot of fun.

“In fourth grade, we do North Dakota studies, and agriculture is a part of North Dakota,” she added.

Joey Bailey and other representatives of the North Dakota Farm Bureau were on hand to help with the program and enjoy slices of pizza with the Rugby students.

“Typically, pre-COVID, we reached about 8,000 kids around the state,” Bailey said of Special Assignment: Pizza. “We’re down a little bit, but we’re back in the swing of things, so we’re getting back in the classrooms. I’d say we reach about 5,000 to 6,000 kids around the state.

“We focus on teaching the kids where the commodities come from that are in their pizza,” she said. “Of course, every kid loves pizza. So, we break the ingredients down to the wheat; we do the oils; we do the meat, the cheese and we even focus on honey, because the recipe we hand out to the kids makes the crust with honey.

“The kids love learning about it,” Bailey added. “There’s a lot of stuff they don’t know.

“There are fun facts such as bubble gum comes from pigs,” she added. “Gelatin from the stomach lining of pigs and cows is used to make bubble gum, so bubble gum comes from pigs and cows.”

“They love learning about that,” Bailey said of the way the fourth graders interact with agriculture. “We’re really excited the Rugby FFA was able to help us because not only are we teaching the fourth graders, we’re teaching the FFA kids to be better public speakers.”

“This is one of the project that our county board finds really important to bring to the kids,” Pierce County Farm Bureau member Tricia Jundt said as she sliced pizza for the students to enjoy after their lesson.

“We’ve brought it every year to the kids for as long as I can remember. It’s just one of the programs from the North Dakota Farm Bureau that we bring to our community,” she added.