Teachers Get Hands-On Lesson in Agriculture : Orchards: Educators pick lemons to help them raise students’ awareness of county’s farming economy.

First-grade teacher Karen Allen had just clipped about 40 lemons under a scorching noon sun Thursday and was sweating bullets.

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With 30 other teachers from west Ventura County schools, Allen had spent the morning touring packinghouses and learning about orchard operations.

But it wasn’t until Allen trudged out to a Ventura lemon orchard and started bagging fruit that she learned some hard lessons about Ventura County’s multimillion-dollar agricultural business.

Hard lesson No. 1: Lemon trees have thorns--big ones.

Hard lesson No. 2: Picking lemons is hot and sweaty work, but it also requires some skill.

“As teachers, our big thing is hands-on learning,” said Allen, who managed to avoid deep scratches despite not having gloves. “Well, this was definitely hands-on.”

Allen, a teacher at Camarillo Heights Elementary School, and the other instructors are taking part in a three-day seminar that organizers say will increase their awareness about the vast field and ranch operations taking place in the west county.

By seeing the farming process firsthand, teachers can better tell students how it takes place and bring some enthusiasm to the subject, said Dick Johnson, coordinator of the workshop.

“We’re looking at ways we can bring agriculture into the classroom,” Johnson said.

Since Wednesday, the teachers have visited farms, watched instructional videos and learned about irrigation. The workshop ends today, when teachers will be given written materials to use back in the classroom, said Donna Pinkerton, a member of California Women for Agriculture, one of the event’s sponsors.

Pinkerton hopes teachers will come away with new knowledge about the agricultural industry and its importance to the local economy. In 1993, the local harvest earned $848 million, placing the industry among the top money producers in the county.

“Agriculture is not just the people who own the land,” she said. “There are a multitude of people involved in getting it from the fields to the grocery store.”

Besides the women’s agriculture group, other sponsoring organizations include the University of California Cooperative Extension and the Hansen Trust of the University of California.

The Hansen family farmed in the Saticoy area for years, said Pinkerton. When Thelma Hansen, the last surviving family member, passed away, she set up a $10-million trust dedicated to agricultural education in Ventura County, Pinkerton said.

The workshop is the first one funded through that trust, she said. Organizers hope to repeat it annually, Pinkerton said.

On Thursday, teachers observed some of the growing and harvesting processes up close. Their day started at 9 a.m. with a tour of Limoneira Co. packinghouse in Santa Paula.

Then the group headed out to a lemon grove, where Limoneira’s vice president of farming operations, Chris Taylor, gave them a little history on the county’s citrus industry and described how lemons are harvested.

By noon, the teachers were doing some harvesting themselves at a Ventura lemon orchard.

“You know how it’s grown,” Johnson said. “You know how it’s packed. Now, we’re going to teach you how to pick.”

Some teachers groaned.

But others enthusiastically strapped heavy picking bags to their shoulders, grabbed pairs of clippers from labor contractor Ralph DeLeon and moved into the hot lemon grove.

There, veteran fruit pickers demonstrated how to quickly shear lemons from a tree. Bev Rueckert, a teacher at Tierra Linda Elementary School in Camarillo, was paired with a female worker who has harvested for 32 years.

“I was mesmerized watching her,” Rueckert said. “You could not see the clipper in her hand, it was moving so fast.”

Glenn Deines, principal of Bedell Elementary School in Santa Paula, gamely clipped lemons, while the experienced worker he was paired with moved twice as fast and quickly filled his bag.

DeLeon told the teachers that the field workers clip an average of three lemons per second.

“If I had to make a living out of this, it would be frustrating,” Deines said. “But now I can really appreciate what these workers do.”

Farm worker Daniel Zagal thought the visit by the teachers was “very nice.” But he was a bit puzzled about why they would want to pick lemons under a hot sun.

“It’s not a very nice job,” said the 21-year-old Oxnard man. “Why do they want to learn this job?”

Rueckert probably had the best answer.

“I will take my enthusiasm for living in a county filled with agriculture back to my students,” she said. “Kids know the difference between something you are excited about and something you are spoon-feeding them out of a textbook.”