“I grew up a city kid. My idea of where food came from was the local A&P grocery store. Occasionally, we’d visit my uncle’s farm “out in the country,” where he grew strawberries, vegetables and enough grain to feed his animals. My mother still has a photograph of me riding a pony at the farm.
In elementary and middle school, we learned about farmers and agriculture in a variety of ways – art, geography, and music, to mention a few. In eighth grade we were required to study “natural resources” for six weeks in our state history class, and I can remember a fair amount about the then-mainstays of our state’s economy – petroleum and agriculture. (It’s interesting I ended up working in both industries, but not in my home state.)
I attended school when teachers required students to memorize things, like a Shakespeare soliloquy (12th grade), the multiplication tables (3rd grade), and occasionally a poem. This one by Ralph Waldo Emerson became famous for one particular line, “…and fired the shot heard round the world.””
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