Agricultural literacy week grows into a month in P.E.I. classrooms

Prince Edward Island students are being encouraged to find out more about farmingthrough a Canada-wide program called Canadian Agriculture Literacy Month.

"We like to think that P.E.I. is still very rural and that people still do have that connection but our volunteers for reading week go into classrooms in Charlottetown, in Cornwall, even in Summerside," explainedRayanneFrizzell, national coordinator for Canadian Agriculture Literacy Month.

"There's a lot of students there who don't necessarily get out to rural P.E.I., who don't have a connection to a farm."

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Where milk comes from

This is the sixth year for the project, which used to be Agricultural Literacy Weekbut has now expanded to a full monthbecause of interest from teachers across the country.

"It really is about telling the story of agriculture," said Frizzell.

"It's important for students to know that the milk they have, whether they drink it at school or at home, how did that milk get to them? It didn't actually come from the refrigerator in the grocery store, that there is a story before it got to that point."

Volunteer readers from agriculture

The P.E.I. Agriculture Sector Council and the P.E.I. Agriculture Awareness Committee oversee the program on the Island, which includes people from the agricultural industry going into almost every Grade 3 classroom to read a book about farmingcreated specially for the event.

The book this year is What's Growing Around Us?and about 50 volunteer readers will visit schoolsacross the Island.

"It's definitely an experience that teachers come back year after year and request and ask for and sign up very quickly for," said Frizzell.

New this year is a social media component where people in the agricultural industry, youth groups and consumers can compete for prizes by sharing a live Twitter video telling their connection to food, from producing it to consuming it, with the hashtag #myfoodstory.

For high school students, there will be a live stream webinar about food waste and a new product called Arctic Apples.

Agriculture Adventure Days

Also new to P.E.I. are Agriculture Adventure Daysat the end of March.

"We're going to bus in close to 1,000 Grade 3 students to the Eastlink Centre and they'll learn from commodity groups, farmers, industry professionals,for about two hours, ten to twelve minutes at each station," explained Frizzell.

"That's our opportunity to highlight what big things are happening here on P.E.I. within different sectors of the industry, so that's a really exciting piece for P.E.I. to add."

The goal this year, saidFrizzell, is to reach over 30,000 students in over 800 classrooms across Canada in March.

"It's about two per cent of the Canadian population that feeds 98 per cent of the population so I think it's important no matter what province you're in," Frizzell said.

Canadian Agriculture Literacy Month is funded by Farm Credit Canada.

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