Bring your classroom, scout group, birthday party or group outside for an experience they will remember for years to come! Many children do not understand that eggs don’t come from a grocery store or that a chicken nugget actually comes from a chicken! Students will be given the opportunity to learn by using their senses of touch, taste, smell and sound, enabling them to understand and remember what they learn on the farm.
Topics cover the full range of sustainable food systems including recycling, conservation, and much, much more! Our goal is to show the children the relationship between a healthy body and healthy food while using our resources wisely.
Pastured chicken and processing room – We pasture raise meat chicken and process them here on the farm. The chicks are housed in a brooder room for 2-3 weeks and then moved to open coops located in the fields. These Cornish Cross chickens have an 8 week life span. At 8 weeks, we respectfully move the chickens to our processing room where friends, family and college students process the chickens. Field trip students will get to see the chickens in their coops, watch how their coops are moved daily and learn how the waste that they leave behind is fertilizing our fields as well as providing them a very clean and sanitary life. Our meat chickens enjoy breathing fresh air while nibbling on green grasses and bugs – the way nature intended it!
Egg mobile – The hayride will journey across the farm to find our egg mobile – home to 70+ chickens. Students will learn the details of the egg mobile operation including how we open and close it daily, (keeping the chickens safe from predators), how we move it in a cycle of every 3 to 4 days and again how their manure is giving back to our field as the chickens disseminate cow patties while happily devouring flies! All the while, they will watch the chickens enter the egg mobile for water, feed and to lay their eggs.
Along the way…
The kids will see the grass-fed cattle and learn about how our meats are “clean” of antibiotics and hormones. They will also see our manure compost pile that we use to fertilize our fields. This pile is composed of not only cow manure but that of horses and chickens, making it an ideal fertilizer!
Upon returning to the barn…
Kids will have the opportunity to see our chicken watering system. Rainwater is collected off our barn and routed to large tanks that provide our breeding chickens with chemical free water.
I’m so excited to view your website! I’m currently trying to get on the grass fed beef kick and am doing my research. Along with that, I’m a special education teacher at Eagleton Elementary. When I came across this page about field trips, I was thrilled! I take my students out once a month for community based instruction and, this being my first year at Eagleton, am searching for places to take them. Your farm would help me to meet several of the standards I need to teach to my students! I have 9 students with disabilities from autism to multiple disabilities. None are in wheelchairs, but a couple do have physical disabilties that make walking a slow process. The hayride would be a blast for all of them. I have 4 adults that would be joining us along with myself. My trips are scheduled for the third Monday of each month so I’m wondering what you have available for October.
Any information would be appreciated!
Thanks,
Leah Smith