LAPORTE — More than 900 school children in LaPorte County attended the 2026 Ag Days and learned more about where their food comes from and the work involved in getting it to their dinner tables.
The fourth grade students were bused from their schools to the LaPorte County Farm Bureau-sponsored event inside the Community Building at the LaPorte County Fairgrounds.
Students spent 10 minutes at each of the nearly a dozen stations devoted to topics like milk production and the process involved in food reaching consumers.
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.
It takes about eight hours to milk all of his 800 head of Holstein cows, Minich said, and nearly five hours to feed them at his farm near Kingsbury, Ind.
The milking and feeding are done twice a day, he said.
Minich also revealed he uses gummy bears from a candy factory in Merrillville, Ind. in his grain mixture for the cows as a nutritional supplement, a longstanding practice in the dairy industry to stretch feed supplies.
The gummy bears are made available to him because they didn’t make the candy maker’s grade for quality, he said.
Still, 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, Minich said.
“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.
The students watched 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,” said Farmer Jeff Mitzner of Wanatah, Ind., who showed the video.
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 LaPorte County could end up anywhere in the entire world,” he said.
The event is an important learning experience since a vast majority of modern school children don’t live on a farm, LaPorte County Farm Bureau President Mark Parkman said.
Teacher Linda Nelson, who brought her fourth grade students from Kingsford Heights Elementary School, agreed.
“We are surrounded by farm land, but I don’t think they really understand what that entails and what it takes to maintain and run a farm,” she said. “It’s a great opportunity for them to get that.”
The event helps students know where their food comes from and everything that’s involved on a farm in caring for the animals, said Jessica Frankowski, a fourth grade teacher at Hailmann Elementary School in LaPorte.
“I think it allows kids to understand parts of agriculture they don’t always get exposed to,” she said.
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Elementary students learn about farming at LaPorte County Ag Days
Reporting by Stan Maddux, Special to The Tribune / South Bend Tribune
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