On a day all things agriculture, there was plenty to learn from horses, aquaculture, dairy, maple syrup, and soil science.
Twenty-five booths were part of this year’s Ag Day at SUNY Morrisville, which attracted nearly 500 participants, including students from Hamilton, Madison, Stockbridge Valley, and Morrisville-Eaton’s agriculture programs, to educate the public and elementary school children about the importance of agriculture.
Fond memories brought local teachers and alumni Phil Keville and Rebecca Werbela back to campus to participate with their students and give back to the college that kick-started their careers in agricultural education.
Keville, an agriculture and technology teacher at Madison Central School, set up an attention-grabbing booth — an aquaculture tank filled with giant goldfish. Next to it was a small tank of axolotls, an exotic-looking, endangered aquatic salamander.
While students gathered around the tank, gasping at the size of the colorful goldfish, Keville described their history, life span, and the significance of water quality in their tanks.
“I am showing them the importance of why we need aquaculture,” said Keville, ’18, ’21, who learned that firsthand as a graduate of SUNY Morrisville’s aquaculture associate degree and environmental & natural resources management bachelor’s degree programs.
Keville’s love for agriculture spawned into a teaching career at Madison Central School, where he recently started his own classroom aquaculture program.
As a student, his special project working with seahorses in the college’s lab carried over into his present classroom, where a tank of seahorses, donated by the college’s aquaculture & aquatic science program, are giving students a glimpse into the rarest life cycle: seahorses are among the few species where the male carries the offspring and gives birth.
Keville’s aquaculture program is modeled after SUNY Morrisville’s aquaculture & aquatic science program. So is his teaching method.
“Just like when I was at Morrisville, I instill as much hands-on as I can in my classroom, something I truly valued as a student,” Keville said.
Similar to Keville, SUNY Morrisville ignited Rebecca Werbela’s love for agriculture and spearheaded her teaching career. Werbela ’04, a teacher at Morrisville-Eaton Middle-High School, launched an agriculture program that is thriving under her leadership.
It is the fifth year Werbela has brought her students to the college’s Ag Day event. This year, she teamed up with Stockbridge Valley to host a maple syrup booth.
“The day gets my students to see what agriculture is,” Werbela said. “This is great outreach for kids who don’t have ag programs in their school.”
Ag Day provided more than a glance of them, including a booth where participants learned all about where our food comes from (seeds) and the components of soil. Arranged by Jen Gilbert Jenkins, associate professor of agricultural science and her students, participants had the chance to roll up their sleeves and actually get their hands dirty touching different types of soil.
