MARTINSBURG, BLAIR COUNTY, Pa. (WTAJ) — If you think agriculture is just growing crop and taking care of animals, you might want to think again.
On Tuesday, some 7th-grade students from Blair County schools visited a local dairy farm, as a part of Altoona-Blair County Development Corporation’s 4th Annual AG Career Day, to learn the importance of agriculture.
Fields like engineering, IT, and veterinary care are essential, and sometimes forgotten, parts of the agriculture industry.
“For a lot of kids, this is the first farm they’ve been to,” Brandon Hescox, science teacher at Bellwood-Antis Middle School, said.
Folks at the Kulp Family Dairy Farm want kids to open their minds to the potential of working in agriculture.
“We’ve had kids that come out and they tell us, like wow we didn’t know that some much was involved in agriculture. We thought it was just, maybe like, milking cows and shoveling manure,” Kate Kulp from Kulp Family Dairy said.
And some students want to learn more after their experience of exploring the world of agriculture.
“It made my interest level go up a bit because I didn’t know about some of the things that we learn about today,” Cami Focht, 7th-grade student at Bellwood-Antis Middle School, said.
And while the main focus was education, students had some fun in the process.
“My favorite part was whenever we took the hayride around and got to see all of the cattle, and I thought it was very interesting,” Focht said.
The event will also be held on Wednesday as more students will be coming from different schools to learn exactly what goes into running the farm.