CCFB News» August 2024

During the last week of June, I traveled to Utah to attend the National Agriculture in the Classroom Conference. The three-day annual conference is an event I eagerly look forward to all year. The conference not only offers a traveling workshop to learn about local agriculture in the event’s hosting state, it also offers educational workshops on a variety of ag topics, from chocolate to hydroponics.

In the fall, I applied to present at this year’s conference, and my workshop “Branching Out into Tree Science” was accepted as three mini-workshops, 20 minutes in length. Between 100 and 150 educators attended the three workshops, where they learned the agricultural uses of trees, the process of grafting, and how a tree’s age is determined using their rings.

What I love most about the National AITC Conference is not sitting and listening to lectures – or standing and giving a lecture. Instead, I love the opportunity to network and get to know other educators that are passionate about agriculture. I met a scholarship-winning teacher from California that is bringing agriculture to her classroom with hands-on growing projects and a new teacher from Canada who was looking for ag lesson plans to add to her curriculum.

My three mini-workshops were the last workshops of the conference, and after my presentations, I returned to the Salt Lake City airport for the second half of my Utah trip: a travel excursion to national parks and historic destinations.

Joining me for the four-day weekend was Illinois Ag in the Classroom Education Specialist Stephanie Hospelhorn. Our first stop was Arches National Park, where we made a five-mile trek up a steep rocky mountain to see the famous Delicate Arch, the arch depicted on Utah’s license plate. During our extended weekend, we also saw petroglyphs carved into rock formations by the Fremont Indians, camped in a teepee, went horseback riding, and saw Pando, a quaking aspen tree clonal system that is thought to be the world’s oldest, largest, and heaviest organism.

Although I wasn’t in a classroom or a workshop, traveling around Utah was educational and taught me about agriculture in the Southwest. I saw fields of hay being irrigated, a donkey farm, cows grazing in a mountain’s valley, a small grove of apricot trees, and ancient corn-grinding stones and 2,000-year-old corn kernels preserved in mud. I saw a small one-room schoolhouse and a small wooden one-room cabin that housed a mother, father, and their 11 children.

My trip taught me how important agriculture was to the native people and the early settlers of the West. They were inventors and innovators, finding ways to make life easier and grow crops and raise livestock. I saw granaries dug into the mountainside, pit houses underground accessed by ladders, and wooden barns and fences.

Although they were busy trying to survive, the residents of Utah always found ways to relax and enjoy life. Native Americans carved images of sheep and horses into rock and had drums and flutes to play music. Early settlers wrote poems and songs and painted pictures. And, like Stephanie and me, they found time to take the scenic route and look up at the starry sky.

Looking back at the photos I took and thinking back and all the great memories I made, I hope to visit Utah again in the future. We only visited a small section of the state, and I’d love to visit the salt flats, Zion National Park, and Bryce Canyon National Park. There’s so much to be explored and so much to still learn – but first I might have to learn how to ski!