Scott County youths get up-close look at agriculture

NEW HAMBURG, Mo. -- The children eagerly brushed and petted "Jellybeans," a pregnant dairy cow, as she stood contentedly on the parking lot of a Catholic church parish center Tuesday.

For many of the 240 third-graders from nine Scott County elementary schools, it was a new experience.

Although they come from small towns and rural areas, increasingly such students don't live on farms, organizers of the fifth annual Farm Day said.

"They don't make the connection that milk comes from a cow," said Scott County Women in Agriculture member Diane Urhahn who lives on a Benton, Mo., area farm.

The organization sponsored Tuesday's event at the St. Lawrence Parish Center.

The cow brought smiles to the faces of third-graders Riley Stark and Shaina Grigery of Kelly Elementary School near Benton.

The classmates are neighbors in a rural residential area near Blodgett, Mo. But neither lives on a farm.

"She's really soft," Shaina said of the cow. It would be fun to have a cow, she reasoned. "You'd get to milk it."

Riley liked running his hand over the cow's bony rump. "It was awesome," he said after brushing the cow.

The students learned that a cow typically gives about eight gallons of milk a day. "She drinks a bathtub full of water every day," said Mildred Kirchdoerfer, who operates a dairy farm in Cape Girardeau County with her husband, Joe.

Jellybeans is one of the Kirchdoerfers' cows.

Pet project

Riley said he'd like to raise cows. "You'd get to pet them all the time," he said.

Besides petting and brushing the cow, students got a first-hand look at a variety of agricultural products from soybeans and potatoes to coffee and bees.

Beekeeper Grant Gillard of Jackson brought along a small, glass-walled box of some 1,000 bees huddled in their honeycomb home.

Caleb Scherer, 9, donned the beekeeper's large headgear called a "veil" and put one arm into a long, protective glove.

"It felt good," Caleb said of the gear designed to keep a person from being stung.

"There's a lot of them," said Andrew Moore, 9, a student at St. Denis School in Benton after observing the mass of bees crowded together.

Gillard said the queen bee does all the work, laying about 2,000 eggs a day in the hive. "The boy bees sit around all day and eat honey," he told the students.

Several of the St. Denis boys liked that idea. But they were less excited about it when told about the rest of the life cycle. When winter comes, the queen bee kicks the male bees out in the cold where they die, Gillard said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

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