Ever hear the saying, experience is the best teacher?
It's a philosophy embraced by grade schools across Iowa where students are learning how
nature is integrally involved in the food they eat every day.
Organizers are hoping that planting seeds will eventually lead to an appreciation for
the environment.
The first step is taking the indoor curriculum outdoors.
And that first step often involves getting your hands dirty.
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There are many ways we learn.
For a child, learning comes through discovery, which often involves getting your hands a
little dirty.
When is the last time you looked at a worm and were blown away by the way it moved?
Could there be a more exciting way to learn about the world you live in?
Or a better time to plant the seeds that will produce a greater understanding and appreciation
of how food is grown?
Isobel Chowanec: Well, we're just trying to instill some sense of food coming from the
Earth and you can do it yourself and you don't have to always go to the supermarket for your
tomatoes.
100 years ago a little over 30% of the labor force in the United States were farmers.
But today less than 2% of the population farms.
With that downward trend there is concern that the disconnect is growing between the
farm gate and the dinner plate.
Ray Meylor: The primary goal is to bring ripe produce to the schools so they can taste it
and pick it when it's ripe and understand the really good flavors and nutrition of eating
produce.
Ray Meylor is passionate in his belief that people should have a better understanding
of how food is produced.
He has donated his time and equipment to till the soil for over 30 metro garden plots.
As a member of the Isaac Walton League, Ray is just one of the 67,000 men and women in
Iowa who belong to a variety of conservation organizations.
They are people who donate their time, their money and their skills to establish wildlife
areas and garden plots for students in urban schools.
Mike Delany: You know, it really makes a whole lot of sense to take ground that is not being
used and plow it up, plant it, get neighborhood groups or church groups or school groups involved
so that people learn what their grandparents all knew how to do, so these kids learn that
they can grow their own food.
According to the website, gardenabcs.com, there are over 80 school and community garden
grants that are available nationwide.
The purpose of the grants are to not only help people have a better understanding of
what it takes to produce food but to also encourage them to make healthy choices when
it comes to eating and to promote the importance of protecting the environment.
Tell me about butterflies and what do they do?
Maia: Well butterflies are pollinators and if we didn't have pollinators we wouldn't
have all this awesome food in our garden because what they do is they take the pollen from
the plants and it sticks on them and then they go to other flowers and they rub it on
that flower and so the seeds grow.
Besides learning how important a healthy environment is to food production, the students get to
sample the fruits of their labor and experience the rich flavors found in food that has been
allowed to ripen on the vine.
Alright, so here's a good question for you.
Before you learned this, if you wanted salsa, where did you have to go?
To the store.
To the store, exactly right.
But did you go to the store to pick this stuff up?
No.
It came right from your --
Garden.
You guys are fantastic and you guys got to go outside --
Heather Anderson: Hands on I think is so important and really I can give them a lesson, I can
read them a book all about let's say butterflies, or bees, I can read them a book and they can
learn all about bees and find answers in books.
But when we actually go outside, the other day we were out in the prairie and two, three
of my students were looking really close and there were a lot of bees on this flower and
one of them, Miss Anderson, they're all excited and they could see the pollen baskets.
Bees have little pollen baskets.
It was so cool that they remembered that and made that connection and saw it.
So that's -- I feel like those moments I think are the moments that will last, I think they'll
have a deeper connection and a deeper understanding.
At schools with garden plots you're just as likely to find students exploring what's going
on in the garden as they are to be playing on the playground.
And surprisingly the gardens are providing other learning opportunities in math, art
and literature.
Rick Cerwick: The benefit to this that has been really surprising, actually not surprising
when you get kids excited about things, things improve.
And their scores are improving in the schools.
And so this is not only are we educating them about conservation but we're also helping
them in higher learning as well.
We had different jobs in the garden like watering, weeding --
Senator Tom Harkin: What they're doing with kids to teach them about the outdoors, about
food and things that kids in cities I think lose a lot of, I think it's just one of the
great attributes of this school.
Having a garden is important and we learned a lot from it.