‘Check Out the Cotton Growing on the Back of This Sheep!’

Ask any Los Angeles schoolkid, and you’re liable to hear that agriculture is a breeze: cotton grows on sheep, chocolate milk is produced by brown cows and white milk comes from a carton at Ralphs.

It’s not surprising, then, that California’s diverse agricultural interests have teamed up to shine some factual light on the state’s largest industry. From county fair booths to World Wide Web sites to summertime seminars in the Central Valley, growers and farm advisors are attempting to cultivate awareness about crop pests, irrigation water and food safety.

Much of their attention is focused on the elementary and secondary schoolteachers who attempt to guide classrooms filled with young city slickers toward a better understanding of where food comes from.

The hope is that teachers and students who feel more connected to their meals--and more aware of the economic benefits of the state’s $24.5-billion agriculture business--will be more sympathetic to the challenges that farmers endure, often in the face of vocal opposition from environmental and farm-labor groups. Today’s students, farmers figure, are the voters of tomorrow who will be making decisions on land use, taxation and other issues vital to agriculture.

Buffered from row crops and livestock by high-rises and freeways, urban children and their parents these days also face a bewildering barrage of often contradictory information about pesticide safety, ground water pollution, urban-rural clashes over water and fieldworker sanitation. Recent crises such as E. coli poisoning from unpasteurized apple juice made by a California company, and the fear earlier this year of hepatitis A in frozen fruit cups processed in San Diego and served at Los Angeles schools, spotlight just some of the ills afflicting modern agriculture--problems that hit close to home for the state’s 6 million schoolchildren.

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Meanwhile, changing times and budget cuts have spelled the demise of home economics classes and playground greenhouses, once a staple at schools statewide. But a move is afoot to bring back some of those programs, including a push for school gardens promoted by Schools Superintendent Delaine Eastin.

“There’s a greater and greater need for this kind of education,” said California Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman, who has helped beef up the state’s agricultural education programs in the last year.

As Joan Zamora’s students spent early August kicking back at soccer camps or splashing in neighborhood swimming pools, the Los Angeles teacher took unpaid leave from summer teaching duties to spend three blistering days at a Bakersfield seminar sponsored by the Kern County Farm Bureau and the Kern Agricultural Foundation, a nonprofit group established to bolster educational efforts.

There she heard lectures about crop-dusting, farm workers and the propagation of beneficial insects to cut down on chemical use. She toured the high-tech baby-cut-carrot plant of William Bolthouse Farms, one of the nation’s leading producers, and fingered bales of cotton at Calcot, a big cotton-growers cooperative.

She also visited potato fields and packing sheds of Lehr Bros., a diversified agribusiness outfit, where manager Pete Belluomini contributed purple potatoes--the stuff of haute cuisine--for planting this fall by Zamora’s third-grade students at Dorris Place Elementary School, near downtown.

“My kids have never touched a cow,” Zamora said of the school’s multicultural medley of Asian, Latino, African American and Russian students, many of them new immigrants. “They have no idea that a carton of milk comes out of a living animal. When they see a jar of strawberry jam, they have no idea what the fruit looks like.”

They’re not alone. Veneman, reared on a peach farm in Modesto, ruefully tells of her niece, who two years ago, at age 11, wondered why the secretary’s agency is called the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “Why food, Auntie Ann?” the girl wanted to know. “Not all food comes from agriculture. Look at Oreos.”

This, Veneman noted, from a girl who lives in the middle of the fertile Salinas Valley and whose father works in a pasta plant.

Decades ago, most people had some tie to farming. That is no longer true, especially in a sprawling metropolis such as Los Angeles.

“Less than 2% of the nation’s population is farmers,” Veneman said. “In Thomas Jefferson’s time, 97% were. In less than 200 years, we’ve gone from a nation of almost complete agricultural dependency to one with no connection.”

Teachers such as Arleen Peta are hoping to rebuild that tie. A 17-year veteran at Miles Avenue Elementary School in Huntington Park, she has been integrating agriculture into her fifth-graders’ lessons and activities since 1981. Her classes have assembled a life-size model of a Holstein cow (complete with all four stomachs) and once adopted a dairy farmer.

Five years ago, she began participating in ag literacy programs for teachers, including the California Foundation for Agriculture in the Classroom, sponsored by the California Farm Bureau Federation. This year, the foundation named Peta its Summer Agricultural Institute graduate of the year and sent her to a national conference in Nashua, N.H.

“I was raised in the city, but in our backyard we always had a garden with row crops,” Peta said. In her classes, Peta uses gardening to teach how sunlight nourishes plants and how water has affected civilization. She is hoping to get funding for a proposal that would enable her students to track food from a local grower, through the packing house, to the downtown produce market and then to a supermarket.

Although California educators find talks by growers and entomologists interesting enough, they really get a kick out of driving tractors, spending a night or two with a farm family and even seeing cow chips up close and personal. In Bakersfield, another big draw was collecting a garlic packing box full of classroom materials, including cotton seeds, a video about egg production, a packet on hunting for safe mushrooms and copies of Captain Cornelius, a kid-oriented corn magazine. The handouts pleased Zamora, who often dips into her own pocket to buy supplies.

Much of what teachers hear is unabashed propaganda for an oft-criticized industry that has not been known for its public relations acumen.

“I tell them, ‘You’re going to hear the point of view of the farmers,’ ” said Mark Linder, president of the Sacramento-based California Foundation for Ag in the Classroom, which grew out of a partnership between San Francisco schools and the state Farm Bureau in the early 1980s. “The story of agriculture in the past has not really been told,” Linder added. “The other side has maybe been more active and vocal.”

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Linder routinely hears reminders of why his job is necessary. He recalls standing next to a young farmer with a new calf when a student approached to ask: “Can you tell me how big the egg was that that calf came from?” Another time, a San Francisco student called over his buddies “to see the cotton growing on the back of this sheep.”

The Farm Bureau contributes 25% of the program’s budget, which this year is $1 million. That’s about 20 cents per student, Linder noted, well shy of the goal of $1 per student annually.

Helping to spread the word is a fledgling television program called “California Heartland.” Geared to urban audiences, the magazine-style farm show--with segments on such topics as fish farming, floraculture and a Southern California banana plantation--has become an unexpected hit since its October debut, capturing 300,000 households each week. Produced by public TV station KVIE in Sacramento, the show has found its biggest audience in Los Angeles, said Jan Tilmon, executive in charge. The station encourages teachers to tape the program for their classes and plans to launch a related Web site Oct. 1.

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Among other new initiatives is the Agriculture Literacy and Fairs Alliance, unveiled last fall by Gov. Pete Wilson to help introduce schoolchildren to the wonders of California agriculture. Now in its pilot phase, the alliance, coordinated through the state Department of Food and Agriculture, promotes ag education at a handful of county fairs and is expected to expand statewide.

In recent months, the state Department of Food and Ag has also set up booths at urban ethnic festivals and inner-city fairs, something that Veneman said hadn’t been tried before. (The department’s Web site at https://www.cdfa.ca.gov has details.)

The fairs alliance program is minimally funded, said state coordinator Carol Spoelstra, whose $200,000 budget must also cover her salary.

Spoelstra, who grew up on a cotton and dairy farm in Hanford in Kings County, recalls hearing her father complain years ago about urbanites’ shrinking connection with farming. “If those stupid Los Angeles people just understood that their food is grown here,” he would say, “they wouldn’t be trying to put us out of business.”

That’s why Spoelstra is happy to help teachers sort out the difference between cotton (which comes from plants) and wool (which comes from sheep) and patiently explain that just because the egg is brown does not mean the chicken will be too.

“While we call it ag literacy,” she said, “it really is a basic understanding of life.”