PALM COAST, Fla. – There appears to be no cracking in a program teaching students nationwide how eggs wind up on their dinner plates.

The American Egg Board (AEB) has extended its partnership with the National Agriculture in the Classroom Organization (NAITCO) for instructing students about the farm to table process and the nutritional value of eggs. The educational outreach by the two organizations since 2017 is active in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Emily Metz, president and CEO of the AEB, said the instruction woven into the curriculum of students from pre-school to the 12th grade “ensures our next generations grow up to be consciously connected consumers.”

In other words, students while grocery shopping as adults will know the eggs in store coolers just didn’t show up by magic.

Lisa Gaskalla, executive director of NAITCO, said the AEB asked her organization to begin the instruction and contributed $10,000 to help with the cost of continuing the effort next year.

“It’s important so students have an appreciation for all that goes into producing the eggs they enjoy for breakfast and other meals throughout the day,” she said.

Gaskalla said NAITCO provides teachers with a website to select from a data base a wide range of topics and lesson material suitable for each grade level. The instruction can vary from the diet necessary for producing eggs to controlling temperature and the amount of light inside hen houses to maximize output because of how chickens lay fewer eggs when the days grow shorter.

Gaskalla said one lesson provides a model for high school students to follow in building a miniature hen house with a light turning off and on with a switch. “Basically, they’re simulating what the real farmer has to do at a real egg farm,” she said.

Other lessons include the many factors involved in determining pricing.

The AEB was created by an act of Congress in 1976 at the request of egg producers wanting to pool resources to market eggs more effectively nationwide.

Money from AEB totally funded by egg producers is used to support the research, education and promotion needed to market eggs.

The educational outreach by NAITCO last year reached 87,000 teachers and 8.2 million students in the United States. Gaskalla said NAITCO, based at Palm Coast, also partners with the National Center for Agricultural Literacy at Utah State University in developing the curriculum.

Agricultural concepts are incorporated in the teachings about math, reading, writing, science, social studies and other subjects, said Tammy Maxey, president of NAITCO and director of the Agriculture in the Classroom program in Virginia.

Gaskalla said food in the United States is so readily available and affordable that many people don’t realize all of the aspects involved in getting it to the consumer. “There’s really a disconect on what really goes into that process,” she said.

Gaskalla said educating young people also means having more elected officials and other community leaders in the future being able to make better decisions on matters related to agriculture from what they learned about farming while growing up. “It’s a very complex process that involves a lot of different factors they probably haven’t even thought of.  That’s why it’s important,” she said.