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Where Does It Come From?

Tazewell County, Va., is a rural area with many visible agricultural enterprises. In fact, it has the largest amount of land devoted to grazing animals in all of Southwestern Virginia. But when members of the local Extension Leadership Council were identifying county needs, they hit upon a key fact: Most of the youth in Tazewell County had little or no connection to that agricultural base, and many of them had a poor understanding of where their food, shelter, and clothing comes from.

“We realized that although our children saw a lot of farming around them, they did not have a good idea of what those farms produced, or where the food they saw in the grocery store came from,” says John Blankenship, 4-H youth development Extension agent.

So, Blankenship and the Leadership Council – in cooperation with the public school system, the Soil and Water Conservation Board, the county Board of Supervisors, and other agencies and groups – created the Tazewell County Food and Fiber Fair. Blankenship says the event is truly a team effort, and it wouldn’t be a success without the involvement of other unit office staff members: family and consumer sciences Extension agent Flo Rush, Family Nutrition Program assistant Anne Arno, and 4-H technician Cissy Killen.

The fair, now in its fifth year, includes more than 20 individual learning stations that teach youth about aspects of agriculture. The stations are designed to align with competencies included in the Virginia Standards of Learning for fourth-graders. In 2008, more than 580 students attended.

Topics include beef, poultry, equine, dairy, honeybees, wool, leather, cotton, forestry, horticulture, nutrition, food safety, and water quality, among others. Blankenship thinks the fair is unique in its approach to the broad concepts of food and fiber. “We have stations where people talk about flax and spinning wool, and where a forester talks about the timber industry,” he explains. “We have had great feedback from the fourth-grade teachers. They say that the fair helps students gain a better understanding of the processes and living systems that produce the food and fiber they use every day.”