Ranch Education Days draw new crop of fourth-graders
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IRVINE FLATS — “Does branding hurt?”
“What kind of cow are those red ones?”
“What’s the hawk’s name?”
“Why is that baby cow getting a shot?”
These questions are just a sampling of the hundreds of questions students from around the valley (Ronan, Polson, Valley View, Dayton, homeschoolers) asked volunteers at the annual Fourth Grade Ranch Education Days held at the Binger Ranch on May 5 and 6.
Big yellow school buses trundled out to the Irvine Flats ranch and arrived at 9:30 a.m. “to give kids a little exposure to agriculture,” Sigurd Jensen explained.
Jensen is the coordinator for the event for the Lake County Conservation District Board.
LCCD board chair Jim Simpson described 4th Grade Ranch Education Days as “an event that helps highlight what we’re doing (agriculturally) in Lake County.”
“Lake County has the most diverse ag base in the state,” Simpson explained.
Lake County has lumber and Christmas tree farmers as well as farmers and ranchers who grow hay, potatoes, grain, cherries, tomatoes, pumpkins, garden vegetables, herbs, flowers and other crops and raise horses, mules, donkeys, cows, sheep, pigs, goats, chickens, ducks, geese and other livestock.
So Fourth Grade Ranch Education Days provide a fun way for students to explore agriculture.
Each teacher gathered his or her students, paraprofessionals and parents and spent 10 minutes at each site, some inside the indoor arena and some outside in corrals around the barnyard. Volunteers, usually ranchers themselves, accompanied some of the groups.
MSU County Extension Agent Jack Stivers timed the students and blew his whistle as a signal for students to move on to the next station.
Carl Moss and his branding crew — wrestlers Hugh Norman and Calvin Swope and vaccinator Carol Swope — branded a calf for each group although the last group of the day got to watch more than one. Moss said the calves were too small when the rest of the calves were branded a couple of weeks ago.
Ranch owner Mac Binger shepherded a group of kids through the stations. As the students peeked through the pole fence, Binger explained that calves receive shots just like babies receive shots — to keep them healthy.
Moss said, “Most of the kids really enjoy the branding.”
Carlee Cottle and Katy Swope, mounted on Rocky and Smokey, quizzed each class on their knowledge of rodeo events and then demonstrated barrel racing for the students. Kids also got to give Smokey and Rocky a pat if the horses ventured close enough to the fence.
In the indoor arena, Mark Vrooman used his paint horse Brother to explain horse behavior to kids as well as safe ways to put a halter on a horse, clean his feet and feed him a bite of carrot. Vrooman is a horse trainer who lives and works on the Binger ranch.
Then students went to a station to learn about noxious weeds. Rene Kittle from Montana State University Reservation Extension Office and Christina Schwend, Educator and Assistant Coordinator for Lake County Weed Control Lake County explained how weeds got to our area and how to control weeds. Kittle and Schwend had dried weeds as well as plastic models of weeds so kids could identify the noxious pests. It took twelve kids to hold a poster showing a leafy spurge plant and its extensive root system.
After talking about weeds, the kids went on to learn about identification of cows with Carrie Clairmont and Dusty Smith from Mountain West Co-op. Clairmont and Smith brought branding irons, traditional and electric, ear tags and explained how they’re used.
Sheep ranchers use paint to mark their sheep, but Susan Gardner’s big black Corriedale ewe wasn’t branded. Gardner called her station “the sheep-to-shawl show.” Gardner brought the ewe and her 10-day-old lamb so kids could get a close up look at sheep and maybe even gently stroke the ewe’s soft wool.
Baskets of raw wool and processed wool and skeins of yarn and finished woolen garments decorated Gardner’s booth. Also Donna Peck was demonstrating turning raw wool into yarn with her spinning wheel.
Peck said one youngster said, “Oh, I’ve seen that before. You prick your finger, and you fall asleep.”
Peck said the girl learned about spinning wheels from Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty.”
Drawing two parallel lines in the soft dirt of the arena floor, Gardner paired students up, Virginia reel style, handing a hunk of wool to one line of students and a hook to his or her partner. By one kid twisting the hook and his or her partner pulling on wool, they “spun” some yarn.
Although Teagan Gray from K. William Harvey in Ronan lives on a ranch has animals, she and partner Kianna Finley were champion spinner and were both enjoying the field trip.
Then it was on to Jeff Nelson and Jack Sutphin, who talked to the kids about dairies. Nelson designs and sells milking parlors, and Sutphin grew up on a farm and milked cows when he was a kid. Sutphin and Nelson demonstrated a milking machine, and students stuck their fingers in the machine to see what it felt like. The men also brought a dairy cow, a wildly spotted Holstein, Jersey and Brown Swiss cross, to show the difference between dairy cattle and beef cattle.
Somewhere in between beef cattle and dairy cattle are longhorns. Jensen showed kids three longhorns. Jensen talked to the students about their beautiful spotted hides and highly prized horns. Longhorn cows are very good mothers, Jensen said, and will protect their calves from anything the range can throw at them, including humans. Nowdays longhorns are used mostly for roping cattle according to Jensen.
Roping is one of the jobs for horses Jane Clapp and Joyce Norman talked about with kids. Clapp and Norman covered jobs for people with horses, also, and explained a little about breeds of horses.
Drumstick the goshawk was next on the rotation and was a favorite of many kids, including Finley. Drumstick is three years old and came with owner Carlos Rodriques. Rodriques, who thinks kids pay more attention when animals and hands-on activities are involved, talked about conservation and a balanced environment, a perfect segue to the next station, the conservation district water trailer.
A perennial favorite with fourth-graders, the trailer is filled with sand and dotted with tiny plastic houses, barns, haystacks, animals, tractors and outbuildings. A stream runs through the miniature ranch. LCCB member John Campbell and Kelly Jensen presented scenarios, such as why should the outhouse not be by the creek and where should the barn be located in relation to the creek and the well for the house.
Colorful posters about farm/ranch safety decorated the Montana Farm Bureau Federation manned by Craig Blevins. Blevins asked the kids questions about safety for everything from changing irrigation pipe to tractor safety.
While all the stations were fun, lunch was also a big draw. Chris Malgren and her crew of volunteers served up hamburgers, chips, apples or oranges, milk and ice cream bars. No lunchroom for these fourth graders either; they picked a patch of prairie and sat on the grass to eat their lunch in the sunshine.
After lunch there was time for a quick game of tag before Stivers’ whistle drew the kids back into their groups.
This is the 18th year the LCCD has held 4th Grade Ranch Education Days Malgren said.
Sponsors who made the event happen included the MSU/Lake County Extension Offices, Montana Stockgrowers, Montana Beef Council, Dan Salomon, Polson and Ronan Chambers of Commerce, Binger Ranch, Mark Vrooman and “countless volunteers” according to Malgren.
High school and college students still remember trekking out to the ranch in Irvine Flats so hopefully this year’s crop of fourth graders will remember information they learned, such as which weed is leafy spurge or where the wool to make their sweaters came from, or maybe even decide to become a farmer or a rancher or an orchardist.
