LAPORTE, Ind. – Over 900 school children in LaPorte County learned more about where their food comes from and the work involved in getting it to their dinner tables. This occurred during the annual Ag Days put on by LaPorte County Farm Bureau.

The children, all in the fourth grade, were bused from their respective schools to the event inside the Community Building at the LaPorte County Fairgrounds. They spent 10 minutes at each of the nearly one dozen stations learning about different things like milk production and the process involved in food reaching consumers from start to finish.

Dairy farmer Frank Minich informed the students just one dairy cow drinks the equivalent of a “bathtub full of water” every day and can produce as much as 10 to 12 gallons of milk over a 24-hour period.

Minich said it takes about eight hours to milk all his 800 head of Holstein cows and nearly five hours to feed them at his farm near Kingsbury. The milking and feeding are done twice a day.

Minich also revealed he uses gummy bears from a candy factory in Merrillville in his grain mixture for the cows as a nutritional supplement, a longstanding practice in the dairy industry to stretch feed supplies.

He said the gummy bears are made available to him because they didn’t make the candy maker’s grade for quality. However, Minich said the discarded gummy bears are less costly than traditional feed and contain sugars that mirror the ones in the corn included in the grain mixture.

“It’s a smart business move for us to do that,” he said.

He also said a few calves are born every day on his farm. “Baby cows are always cute,” quipped one student.

Vern Schafer, who raises about 90 head of beef cattle in the LaCrosse area, informed the students that cows have four stomachs and are also fed silage, which are corn plants chopped into tiny pieces out in the fields. The silage is heated and cooled while going through a fermentation process before it’s given to the cows.

“It’s very palatable for the cattle because they have a special stomach that lets it digest this stuff,” he said.

Schafer also revealed that steaks “come out of the muscle of a slaughtered animal” and leather jackets are made from the hides of cows once all their meat has been harvested.

Farmer Jeff Mitzner, of Wanatah, played a video showing how 25 tons of freshly harvested cucumbers are loaded into trucks and shipped to processors who turn them into pickles.

“They are going to be put in a can or a jar like that for you to use to buy at the grocery store,” he said.

The video also displayed how tomatoes are harvested by machines and then put through a shaker to remove any rocks or other debris from the plants before they’re shipped for processing.

People riding on the harvesting machines remove any bad tomatoes from the crop, said Mitzner, who raises mostly corn, soybeans, wheat and cattle. 

Paul Herrold, who raises primarily corn and soybeans on about 3,500 acres in the Westville area, said the students in his presentations seemed most surprised that flour comes from grinding wheat.

He also told how his soybeans a few years ago were taken to an elevator in Union Mills for shipment to China.

“Literally, crops grown here in La Porte County could end up anywhere in the entire world,” he said.

LaPorte County Farm Bureau President Mark Parkman said the event is an important learning experience since a vast majority of school children nowadays don’t live on a farm.

Teacher Linda Nelson, who brought her fourth-grade students from Kingsford Heights Elementary School, agreed.

“We are surrounded by farmland but I don’t think they really understand what that entails and what it takes to maintain and run a farm. It’s a great opportunity for them to get that,” she said.

Jessica Frankowski, a fourth-grade teacher at Hailmann Elementary School in La Porte, said the event helps students know where their food comes from and everything that’s involved on a farm in caring for the animals.

“I think it allows kids to understand parts of agriculture they don’t always get exposed to,” she said.