The Moos Room™

[music]
Joe Armstrong: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. No Emily today. Late, scratch on that one. She is up north, not good internet, and won't be able to join us. Brad is here. Good or bad, he's here.
Brad Heins: For once in my life, I'm together again.
Joe: Yes. He's been running around the state, but he did make it today and it's good. More importantly, we are joined by two guests today. We have some people that work with Minnesota Ag in the Classroom and we have the executive director here of the foundation, Ann Marie Ward, and also an education specialist with the Minnesota Department of Ag, Keri Sidle. Those two are here today. How are you guys doing?
Keri Sidle: Pretty good. It's a beautiful day out.
Joe: Finally.
Ann Marie: It's even summer in Northern Minnesota.
Joe: Exactly. How far north are you, Ann Marie?
Ann Marie: I am in Northern Beltrami County, I am just north of Bemidji.
Brad: It's not snowing there today, right?
Ann Marie: It's not snowing here today. I will say in May we had snow banks still probably about hip high in my hood and mosquitoes at the same time. I did mulch my gardens over snow because I refused to give up on my personal timeline for my garden so I could keep moving with the rest of my spring plant.
Joe: That's stubborn. That's what you need to live in Northern Minnesota. All right. Well, before we get too far, and we get into background and why we've asked these two to join us today. We have two incredibly important questions and I think we'll start. We'll do one question for each and then we'll jump to the next question. I think I know some of your background so we'll start on the dairy side. Anne Marie, what is your favorite dairy breed?
Ann Marie: Dairy breed? Jersey. Unless we're going to go with goats, but we're not going to go with goats but I'm going with Jersey.
Brad: That is the correct answer.
Ann Marie: Literally, I got to have one. We had Holsteins growing up and I got to have one Jersey because I must have whined enough, [unintelligible 00:02:15] one day.
Joe: Good work because that is the right answer. All right. No pressure, Keri, but--
Keri: I know, I need to get that same reaction. I like Brown Swiss, not for any real production reason, but in Switzerland, once I saw them on the hillside as I was going up to the top of the mountains, and ever since, I just have enjoyed the Brown Swiss.
Joe: I can't argue with you there and at least it's not Holstein. That's the important part. We don't want votes for Holstein. We'll run a recap for everyone that's trying to keep track of how this is going. Holsteins are at 23, Jerseys at 15, Brown Swiss at 9, Mont Bellard at 3, Dutch belted at 3, Guernsey at 3 with a shout out to Taffy, Normandy at 2, Milking Shorthorn at 1, and Ayrshire at 1. You might have guessed the next question, which is, what is your favorite beef breed?
Ann Marie: Oh, I have to say Angus, Black Angus specifically.
Keri: I'm going to go a little different. I grew up in Florida and was always intrigued by Brahmin cattle and their interesting look and ability to thrive in Florida.
Joe: Perfect. You're not the first Brahmin vote, so that's good. Let me rearrange some things and then we'll run down the total. Black Angus holding strong on top at 16, Herford at 10, Black Baldy at 5, Scottish Highland at 4, Red Angus at 3, Shorthorn at 3, Belted Galloway at 2, Brahmin now at 2, Charolais at 2, and then Hol with 1. Stabiliser, Gelbvieh, Simmental, [unintelligible 00:03:49], Jersey, Normande, Belgium Blue, Brangus, Piemontese, and White Park. We have quite a variety going on there. Those are the important questions. As promised, they weren't scary, right?
Brad: No.
Joe: Okay, good. You guys had pretty quick answers, so you must have thought about this in the past or at least knew exactly what you wanted to say right away.
Keri: I did listen to a few episodes today and took some time to think about what would be my favorites.
Joe: [laughs] The secret is out. That's good. Well, we appreciate you listening even if it was just to get ready for this episode. Let's get into a little bit of background. Ann Marie, you said you're from up in Northern Minnesota, at least right now. Where did you start? Are you from there?
Ann Marie: No, I am originally from Central Michigan. Those people that know Michigan well, I am from the lower peninsula, so technically I am a troll. I am from northern Michigan, right in the middle of the Minton. Grew up being literally farmed out to family members' farm. I spent a lot of time on bailing and harvest cruise. Lot of time planting and catching muskmelon because that was a part of my family farming operation. I spent a lot of time in a hog barn. That's where it began. I climbed a lot of trees and talked to a lot of cows when I was little because that's just what you did.
Joe: Perfect. Harvesting any kind of melon or pumpkin, probably my least favorite job in the world. One of them. Rock picking is terrible. I don't like rock picking, but you can throw rocks around and it doesn't matter but you got to actually be careful with the melons. Not my favorite.
Ann Marie: The crew I harvested with was the same crew that we bailed together. Through the years, we had quite a relationship and you'd wait for just the right time because you're passing melons like you pass the basketball when you're doing drills and you'd save to the very end some of those rotten ones that literally go through your fingers and then you're covered in melon slime, and bees. Those were very memorable teenage years.
Joe: Formative you might say.
Ann Marie: Very formative
Joe: All right. Keri, same question to you.
Keri: Yes, so I grew up in Florida. I didn't grow up on a farm, I really didn't grow up in agriculture. It wasn't until I got to college at the University of Florida that I got interested in agriculture and changed my major to Ag education and took a livestock evaluation class and became an Ag teacher. Then I moved to Minnesota and here we are now working with Ag in the Classroom and teachers,
Joe: Well, we happily accept you into the Ag community, secret's out. I think I've said this on the podcast before, I didn't grow up on a farm either. I grew up in the cities here in Minnesota, so yes, always happy to meet someone else that was also converted. Let's get down to business,. Open to either of you, maybe you have different answers. Before we get too far in this, I want everyone to be on the same page. Big picture, what is Minnesota Ag in the Classroom and what is the goal?
Ann Marie: Okay, I will take the jump on this one. Minnesota agriculture in the classroom. Think of it as your old-fashioned three-legged milking stool just to keep it in perspective. The program is the ultimate goal with the mission of increasing agriculture literacy through K-12 education. We are a public-private partnership, the foundation, and the Department of Agriculture in Minnesota. Minnesota Ag and the Classroom Foundation has a memorandum of understanding with the Minnesota Department of Agriculture to work to increase agriculture literacy through K-16 education.
The 16 might pose a few questions and I'm going to let Keri dive into that a little bit in how they do that, who are comprised through this memorandum of understanding with this amazing partnership that brings us Keri as well as Suna as education specialist on our team. We have three resource specialists spread throughout the state. Myself as the foundation executive director and we have a program called Farm Camp Minnesota as well. We work to provide experiences for classrooms, for educators, professional development for educators and really keep them diverse and help bring educators and students to agriculture and take agriculture to the classroom.
Whether it's a virtual or it's in-person or it's with one of the over 500 pieces of curriculum that meet state standards that are based in agriculture that our educators utilize. I'm going to hand over to Keri to talk a little bit about educator experiences and how they empower educators.
Keri: I was going to say so. I see my role really to empower educators to use agriculture in teaching science, social studies, language arts, all of those academic subjects because most of us, myself included, two of us on this call, and we didn't grow up on farms. You have to learn all of that somewhere. For teachers to want to use that in their classroom and teach their students, we provide ready to use curriculum for them to use. We have our Ag Mag, our print student magazine that they can order. We also do workshops for teachers and Anne Marie mentioned that K-16 piece.
We go in and work with pre-service teachers. Those are teachers that are in college right now to become teachers and do workshops with them to show all of our resources so that they know where to find those and are exposed to them to know that they're out there. Then lastly, and my favorite part are we do summer teacher tours and we take teachers on site to farms to meet with farmers, to see Ag businesses up close. They've had that experience and then they can take that back to their classroom to share it with their students.
Joe: There's all sorts of questions. I'm struggling to figure out where to start. The big thing that I noticed right away when I was looking through your list of programs and the things you're doing is it does seem really, really balanced between education and experiences for the kids, but the same thing for teachers. I was just really happy to see that because I feel like my initial exposure to Minnesota Ag in the Classroom was like, "Well, yes, of course, it's for the kids and everything else", but that can only have so much impact if the teacher's not on board.
Keri: I'm glad that you noticed that. There are some misconceptions that we as Ag in the Classroom, that we are going out into classrooms and teaching students, and that is absolutely valuable, but we are taking the model where we are working with teachers and providing teachers with resources that they take to their classroom and teach with their students. When you think about the numbers, I work with 25 teachers and they have 25 students, shoot, I just put myself on the spot to do math. That's a lot more students than if I went into one classroom and worked with 25 students just by myself.
We could have a lot more impact by working directly with teachers to give them the resources to go back into their classes. I'm not a math teacher anymore. I did teach ninth-grade math in my first year of teaching. 625 students-
Joe: Yes, 625.
Keri: -would be the number of those 25 teachers that I could do an hour workshop with. They go back 625 students versus if I spend an hour with just 25 students. We do provide some resources, some programs now that are directly for students, our virtual field trip program and farm camp, those are both going to be programs that students interact with directly and teachers have to set that up and bring it to their students, but that is more direct to students.
Ann Marie: On that note, with the virtual field trips, some of the pieces can be found, actually, the majority of them can be found on the Minnesota Agriculture and the Classrooms YouTube channel. It's this beautiful partnership with Department of Agriculture, but this has been one of those really favorable bumps in the road when we housed our resources on a Department of Ag YouTube channel, and then we were bearing their content, so we got a chance to get our own YouTube channel. It's fun that we have so much content out there that can be used, not necessarily Evergreen, but you have a chance to go and look. You guys might want to check out and see what's in there. We've done some pretty fantastic dairy visits and we also have a lot of other pieces in our virtual library, harvested a month videos are extensive and amazing for every age group.
Also not just classroom teachers, but community resources and community advocates, whether it's extension, 4H, FFA, it's a community farm tour, it's Farm Bureau, or Farmers Union that are hosting events. There's resources for all of them, and they all connect with us and utilize our resources. We always like to say we don't want people to reinvent the wheel. We've got resources, activities, lessons, and workshops, and webinars that are available for anybody that's in education and advocacy for agriculture. There's a lot of great options out there.
Keri: Can I quiz you guys?
Joe: Yes, absolutely.
Keri: Okay. Quiz you, I'm just going to have you predict. When do you think Ag in the Classroom started?
Joe: That's a tricky question since I can't look. Let's see, Minnesota Ag in the Classroom, I would say if I had to guess it would be at a time when ag was down and we needed more education, so I'd go 80s.
Keri: Not bad. 1985 is when it first got started in Minnesota. 1986 was the first issue of our Ag Mag series that went out into classrooms. We had one product, the program, that's what it started on, was the Ag Mag, and reason I'm telling you all these things we do now, but I want to take it back for a minute. 1985, we started, and not me, I was not actually around yet.
I liked to tease the director that the Ag Mag before me [unintelligible 00:14:00], he retired. He spent 35 years. I may have given him too many years there. 33, 34 years, a long time, really championing this program and starting it from the Ag Mag as its initial sole offering three issues, one Ag Mag. Now we have 14 Ag Mags, 2 for every grade level, kindergarten through sixth-grade that is specific grade-level content for those grades, and that came from teachers telling us they wanted that. We take agriculture content, look at the state standards, create stories, and then deliver that out to teachers and students across Minnesota.
Joe: Yes, that has to be one of the most challenging pieces is to make sure it's age specific. Because I've got a toddler right now and it feels like he's making jumps day to day. He's in a completely different spot. It has to be difficult to cover all the age groups. That's blowing my mind how much work that would be.
Ann Marie: Well, when I say we have an Ag-passionate team, that might be an understatement. As Keri said, we have four 14 issues. Not only are they grade-specific, but they meet state standards. They are matched and aligned with standards, real classrooms, real classroom teachers test drive them before they go into the big final print mode. As Keri said, this was requested by educators just prior to the pandemic. We launched the new program farm camp, which we'll get into, and the Ag Mags, at a time when most people were sunsetting anything print. Instead of sunsetting resources, we actually expanded. That's really exciting. Keri, what have our numbers done as far as educator requests? All of this is free. Just want to make this really clear that because of our investors, all of these resources and services are free to our classroom teachers and our community advocates.
Keri: This has been a banner year. We've increased our subscription, our order numbers by over 20% this school year from last school year. The word is definitely getting out at that these high-quality educational resources exist. They're free. I know we just said that, but they're free and they come color printed specific to Minnesota, specific to the standards for that grade level. I imagine that it's going to continue to increase that way as more and more teachers discover us and we're trying to do some new things around digital marketing and getting the word out to teachers all over the state that these exist and that all you have to do is sign up for them and then we send them to you.
Joe: The question I have, and I think you already got at this, but I want to make sure, other than it's free, that's really important to note. Some of the things that we see with advocacy and, for agriculture, it seems sometimes it's like a club beating someone over the head with it, but this seems to be more just integrated and trying to normalize agriculture in everyday life. Am I getting that right? Are things integrated in that way so that we're not talking about Ag-specific courses, we're talking about using Ag within a math course, or using Ag when we're talking about social studies, right? Am I on the right track there?
Keri: You are on the right track. Even taking it a little bit further, we love agriculture teachers to use our materials and to use our programs, but they're really not our target audience. If someone's listening and they're thinking, "Oh, let me go tell our Ag teacher in town about our resources", please do, but even, even more, is that I want you to go tell the kindergarten teacher or the fifth-grade teacher, the high school social studies teacher that we have resources and curriculum that cover agriculture for them. In social studies, there are a couple of classes, a couple of courses standards that specifically mention agriculture. We have a whole suite of resources. We call it food for thought that the Minnesota Alliance for Geographic Education helped us write these lessons, create maps that use the latest census data for Minnesota to create student desk maps and lessons, and some interactive online maps that's all available, meets state standards for high school social studies over here at Ag in the Classroom.
Ann Marie: Those Ag Mags are kindergarten through grade six, and they are digital and flippable on our website as well. mnagmag.org, very simple place to test drive them, but what we found is teachers still really like having that physical magazine in the hands of their students.
Joe: I'm old school. I have a hard time reading anything, I have to concentrate on at all if it's online. I need paper in my hand, so I'm all for it. I have one more question before we get into some of your flagship programs and what those are. I think one of the things that I experienced living in rural Minnesota and rural a lot of places is that times have changed quite a bit and there's a lot of kids in rural Minnesota that also are not exposed to Ag. I just wanted to give you guys a chance to talk about that because I think sometimes the conception is that this is for city kids, and to me seems like even in a town of 1,000 or 3,000 in rural Minnesota, there's still a lot of kids that are not exposed to Ag enough.
Ann Marie: Okay, you- spot on. That is really true, and it's not like we're saying, "We're going to do crop identification of what your bus is going past", but it's really all in all a matter of that big picture, where your food comes from, where your fiber comes from, where your fuel comes from, what are natural resources and how do they impact your daily life? The other aspect, Joe, is we want to make sure that through these opportunities and experiences, not only do they learn those pieces, but they start to understand that there's a place for them in agriculture, you have a place in agriculture that runs deep and it's diverse, but you didn't start in agriculture.
Not just opening opportunities for them to learn, "Hey, today we're going to learn that corn can grow a number of days depending on the seed. We're going to talk about plant genetics, we're going to do this, we're going to do that." It really is that whole picture and helping them understand from those basics, the fact that your clothing, it's got cotton in it. Cotton is plant. Helping, as Keri said, every grade level of teacher, be able to take their subject matter and infuse agriculture into those lessons using agriculture as that foundation for learning.
I don't know that there's a better way to engage a young person than to talk about food or gauge any person than to talk about food and its relativity to where it came from across the globe or across the county. Really expanding that thought process about agriculture, not just being something you save to discuss in an agriculture class or with an ag teacher. Keri touched on this a little bit, geography teachers love us. We love maps and to be able to look at a map and look at, "Hey, let's talk about frost-free days. Some parts of our state don't have a whole lot of them. What grows there? What gets imported and exported, and rather it's global trade, or it's your local farmer's market." There's a lot of great lessons there that can be translated into those lessons in the classroom.
Joe: I lied. I have one more question. To me, this is amazing. Now I'm biased. I'm in the ag field. I love agriculture, but not everyone can be happy about this. How much pushback do you get and how do you guys handle that?
Keri: We try really hard to bring and show all kinds of agriculture within our Ag in the Classroom program. Every single resource that we have is not going to cover every kind of agriculture in Minnesota. It's impossible. I think most people see this if they go and they take a look at everything. We are showcasing, highlighting everything from small farms to large farms, from conventional to organic, to kind of everything in between. We do get that sometimes that people may look at one resource than and think that. We do our best to then point them towards some other of our resources or other lessons that may cover more of what they're coming from, but truly my ultimate goal is that every student or everyone that's interacting with us is going to have all their choices available to them, and then they get to make that choice of what they want their food to look like or what kind of foods they want to buy or how they want to live, but it can be tricky and we sometimes have to tell some of our site hosts for virtual field trips or some of our articles to focus really on the benefits or the positives as to why they do it that way and to not be highlighting or not hounding on the negatives and how, why everyone else they don't agree with what they do and how they do it.
Really to talk about themselves and why they do it the way they do. What I think is really great about us being at the Department of Agriculture is that's part of our mission from the Department of Agriculture and so we really stick to that and, and do our best to showcase all of it and make a space. Make a space in our resources for everyone.
Ann Marie: The overall vision for Minnesota Ag in the Classroom is that agriculture is valued by all. In order to do that, we need to look at the diversity of what we're covering and also how we cover it and make it available. I feel like I'm fairly well-read when it comes to all the ag journals and magazines across the state and beyond. In the last couple of years, I was so inspired and learned so much through the work and the studies and the reports that we've done on [unintelligible 00:24:01]. There's a lot to learn. It's pretty cool things to look there. Reindeer. I honestly didn't know that there was a difference between reindeer and caribou. Wow, that was exciting. Now I know what to look for. I'm pretty proud of that.
Then mushroom. Harvesting, growing mushrooms. The fact that you can harvest a crop of mushrooms in seven days? Fascinating. There's so many different things to learn about and there's so many things that are produced in Minnesota to appreciate all of that, but some of those bigger picture things, as Keri was saying, making sure that when people are sharing their story of agriculture, it's their personal story and we really [unintelligible 00:24:39] for them not to have those biases because one topic alone, soil health. Soil health alone, there are a lot of diverse opinions. Being able to have people that can discuss why they've made the choices they've made to showcase their types of farms, that's really valuable for all of us to learn and to consider the options. We provide an opportunity for people to learn about agriculture and how they can infuse that into their classrooms, how they can infuse those lessons into their community, and really inspire all of us to continue to learn more.
Joe: That's perfect. I think actually the very first person to mention Minnesota Ag in the Classroom on this show was way back in episode 58. That would've been almost two years ago now. Natasha Mortenson talked a lot about that in her episode saying whether or not you like almond milk as a dairy farmer, that's still another farmer. There's space for everyone and it's all ag. I think we got that early in this show's history, and it changed my perspective a little bit to think a little bit about that. I can debate if we want all day the protein and everything else between milk and almonds, but at the end of the day, it's all ag and that's a good thing. I'm done asking questions too much. We need to highlight some of your flagship programs. We've mentioned a couple of them. Some are teacher tours, your virtual field trips, and then Farm Camp Minnesota.
Ann Marie: I want to talk a little bit about Farm Camp.
Joe: Let's do Farm Camp because it brings to mind what I think it is, but I don't really actually know.
Ann Marie: Farm Camp Minnesota is a program under the umbrella of Minnesota agriculture in the classroom and so with that, we're really targeting fifth through 12th-grade classrooms and providing them an overall experience. Really digging deep into that experiential learning. This program, we launched during the pandemic, which was kind of risky, but we had investors who were like, "Hey, let's do this." We also had educators that were looking for opportunities to engage and inspire their students, even if it had to be virtually. Rather they were in their classroom or they were at their kitchen table. With Farm Camp Minnesota, that vision is really to provide a three-part experience. It's not an overnight.
It's not that type of physical going-to-camp experience, but it's really creating a more immersive environment for students to learn.
I'm sure many of us have gone on a field trip or went to a destination and didn't know anything about where we were going, what we were going to see. Sometimes you go to some of these beautiful ancient and historic buildings and then afterwards you're like, "Well, I wish I would've known that much about it before I went." With Farm Camp Minnesota, the concept is our program director recommends lessons for the classroom teacher to do in the classroom, and they work to meet the classroom where they are. If you're studying plant genetics, here's some lessons to utilize with your ninth-grade plant science class. Utilize these lessons. Then we're going to coordinate that second part of the experience with what we call an ag host. Whether they come into your classroom virtually, or we take your students to that destination to learn more about plant genetics and plant science.
That would be that second component. The kids get to ask questions, whether it's virtual or it's in person. They get to see, feel, touch, and smell. Oftentimes during the pandemic when we had them virtually, those ag host sent things out to the classroom teachers or they got to have things sent to the students' homes.
The third component is career conversations. Talking about careers and agriculture. I've yet to have very many teachers say, "I'm excited to talk about careers in agriculture." The majority of them say, "This is out of my wheelhouse. How am I going to have a conversation about careers in agriculture when I don't know what they are or how to talk about it?" How do I start that? Having some of those conversation starters is really valuable. Creating some suggested lessons, some activities, we're also working on producing some videos.
We got a partnership we're working on with public television to create some resources that make it easy for our classroom teachers who, again, are non-ag teachers to talk about careers with students. Our students today can see themselves engaging with agriculture tomorrow. We just did pretty extensive ninth-grade experience with Farm Camp and East Grand Forks. One of the biggest comments that came back from students was they had no idea there were so many engineering jobs in agriculture. They did three different facility tours. That was just really, really inspiring.
It's like, okay, we hit the mark and being able to have pre and post-surveys of these students that take these Farm Camp experiences with their classroom or with their educators to come back and see that 30% of them could name an ag career in their community, and then afterwards, 90% can, and seeing the number go from like 11% to 80% that could name five careers in agriculture in their community is pretty inspiring. Really having that all together. One of our biggest barriers, probably not a surprise, is transportation. Schools are struggling to have enough bus drivers, to have enough money for transportation. We have investors from biofuels that said, "Hey, let us help you get that barrier out of the way." We're able to help with transportation scholarships so schools can take those students on these farm camp experiences and really bring that full picture to the students and getting them inspired. One of your earlier questions, have we had any pushback? I have had some great personal responses from students who said, "I learned a lot, but this isn't my thing."
That's fair. We need everybody. To find a way to help our educators and our students at least get a glimpse at what real-world agriculture looks like versus what they might see or hear in the media, that doesn't give a proper perspective of what agriculture is, especially here in Minnesota.
Joe: I guess the biggest question connected with that is, how does an educator that's interested get hooked up with a farm camp?
Anne-Marie: Minnesota Ag in the Classroom has a great website. It has a lot of great depth to it. There are sections there to click into to look for educator resources and experiences. We have a farm camp website, and you can directly connect with the farm camp program director right there from our website. There's always names and numbers to call. There's a lot of opportunities for professional development, classroom experiences, for virtual experiences for your students. Maybe Keri should touch on a feature we have for some of our lower grade levels too with Farm and Food Book Week. We work really hard to provide diverse experiences to help educators infuse agriculture where they're at, regardless of their grade level, where they're at in the state. Also, something we're very, very proud of. In 2021, we had a really long-time goal of this organization. We have resources being used for Minnesota Ag in the Classroom and experiences being taken in every county in the state.
To know that our resources are reaching every county of the state is really fantastic. Our goal is to continue to go deeper, to increase that engagement with each and every educator and within this schools. It's the little things that count, like the paper for those lower grade levels are crayon friendly. Changing that whole concept is how do we look at this?
We look at it and we have real teachers give us their reviews, and we work with our amazing team together to look through things, to talk through things, and take that feedback. We have an educator advisory team that helps us with a lot of things now too. Again, we couldn't do any of this without the support of our investors. Moving the mission of increasing agriculture literacy through education in those classrooms and beyond, it takes the whole team, it takes the whole community of Minnesota agriculture to make it happen.
Joe: Keri, Anne-Marie mentioned the Farm and Food Book Week. Can you tell me about what that is?
Keri: Yes, so Farm and Food Book Week, it's a newer event that we've started. It's all virtual, it's book readings. We pick out different books that are agriculture themed and have celebrity or special guest readers read the books for the kids, and then the kids get to ask questions on screen. They can come up to the camera and ask their question. Midwest area is a really great partner for that event. They provide one of their Vikings player appearances for that. It's often always the biggest attended reading of the time. Even though the football players are generally not from a farming, or agriculture background, they're able to make that connection that even if you're not a farmer, agriculture is still really important to everyone's lives. We've had book authors, all sorts of special guests that will come on and read to these kids and answer their questions. It's been really fun. It's super fun. I love it.
Joe: Final thoughts from the two of you before we let you go.
Keri: Good job doing a podcast for this long and this many episodes, [laughs] we tried to foray into podcasting once and we only lasted a few months.
Joe: Yes, it's a grind. You got to, especially if you want to come out weekly, which I think it has to unless you're doing these giant ones. There's some that are 8-hour-long podcasts. Those can come up once a month if you need to, but once a week, it's a grind. I'm not alone though. I've got the two co-hosts, even though they're not here right now.
Anne-Marie: Another big thing is thank you for giving Emily so much time with mental health. For those of us who unfortunately have had significant losses within our families in our circles with suicide, we can't talk enough about it and making sure that mental health is a topic and a conversation that is had frequently. Thank you for that.
Joe: I've learned a lot from Emily and giving her time is probably the wrong word. She takes it if she wants it. [laughs] That's part of it. Now, I've learned so much from her. It's too bad she's not here today to hear that in person, but she'll listen and hear it later. All right, with that, we're going to wrap it up. Thank you, guys, for being here. We really appreciate it.
Anne-Marie: Thank you. We appreciate the invitation and the opportunity.
[music]
Joe: If you have comments, questions, scathing rebuttals to this episode, please email The Moos Room at themoosroom@umn.edu. There's plenty more plugs coming, so stay listening. As promised, here are the plugs that I was talking about. If you need more information about Minnesota Ag in the Classroom, please go to minnesota.agclassroom.org. More information about Farm Camp Minnesota can be found at farmcampmn.org. More information about Ag Mag Minnesota can be found at mnagmag.org. Great information, plenty to learn. Hope you visit those websites. Thank you for listening. Catch you next week.
[music]
[00:35:57] [END OF AUDIO]

1