The taco.
To the uninitiated, the taco is something you reach out and grab as you swing through a fast-food drive-thru. But at Sunset Terrace Elementary School, the Mexican food became a starting point, an entry into a deeper understanding of how agriculture and farms feed the world.
So on Wednesday, about 600 Sunset Terrace students were introduced to the Rochester Urban Village, an ag literacy program taught by more than 40 FFA students from area high schools.
The program involved a classroom discussion, a puppet show and seed planting and culminated with a backyard display of pigs, cows, chickens and lambs.
"We're just trying to give them the big picture of agriculture," said Valerie Earley, a Kingsland High School senior and leader in the Spring Valley-Wykoff FFA. "We're trying to connect their food plate and all the different parts of that to the different parts of agriculture."
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Why the taco? Such a simple food item, but what better way to dissect the multifaceted nature of farming? The meat comes from beef cattle. The cheese sprinkled on top comes from the milk of dairy cows. The shell is made of corn. And — and this is not of small importance — it happened to be what Sunset Terrance students consumed in their lunchroom that day.
This was the first year local FFAs brought the one-day ag program into Rochester schools. The program is modeled after one developed by the Morris area FFA and taught to students in Twin Cities schools the last four years.
The 40 or so FFA students who delivered the program came from Stewartville, Lanesboro, Triton, Kingsland and John Marshall high schools. But they all shared a passion for talking about what farms are — and what they are not.
FFA members said they hoped to dispel any false impressions about what farms have become in the early 21st century. Yes, farms have become larger and, yes, the image of a corporate-run agriculture industry is spreading, but there are still family-run farms that operate on the same values as earlier generations, Earley said.
Earley noted she and her sister both do chores every morning. Her sister loves to help on the farm, and Earley loves to organize programs such as Wednesday's urban agriculture event to help enhance understanding of what goes on at farms.
"Agriculture is such a changing industry," Earley said. "There's so much technology. Farms are changing, but they also continue to be family (run operations) — with the same values people imagined in the past."
