MES students win awards for Ag essays

Malta Elementary School visited Hinman Angus in early September for the annual Ag Ed Day. Following the field trip, MES students were tasked with writing essays on the topic of "What I Liked Best." Each of the essays were read and one from each grade was selected the top choice and the winners were awarded sports balls courtesy of The First State Bank of Malta. What follows are those winning entries:

MacKenzie Whitmer

MES 1st Grade Winner

I went to milk a cow.

I love the Farm.

I learned too about water.

I like sheering sheep.

I like the best farm ever. I like about everything.

I like Daisy the cow dressing up.

I like the sheep.

Steeler Blunt

MES 2nd Grade Winner

H is for Hinman.

We went to the Hinman Ranch. You want a slow easy river with grass and with curves. You don't want to waste water. Most water on earth is not drinkable. Red foods help fight cancer. Green food helps your blood. Blue foods help your brain. At the shearing station 2nd grade's sheep was 75 pounds. You can make clothes out of wool. We learned a lot about agriculture at the Hinman ranch.

Teegan Judd

MES 3rd Grade Winner

I learned a lot at Hinman's Ranch. I learned that cows give us leather, crayons, candy and beef. Beef gives you zip, zinc, iron and protein. We also learned about water. There is not as much as you think! There is a half a quarter of the water we can use! We can't use ocean water. The ocean is most of the water in the world. Then we learned about brands. For example you say this "♦/8" like the Diamond Bar Eight. They split us into groups and they gave us balloons and we wrote our groups brand. Then we put the balloons in a rope circle. The two groups went into a circle for each group. Then we ran to the balloons and had to get our groups brand back to our circle with only our feet. We also learned about sheep wool. There was one guy who showed us how to cut off sheep wool, and he let us have some wool that he had cut off a faced sheep. We also learned that white wool is better than black. We also learned how to milk a cow. After we milked the cow we learned how to make butter. Then we dipped crackers in the butter. Then we got ice cream. My favorite thing I did was milk the cow. I loved the field trip.

Tropper Stiles

MES 4th Grade Winner

On Ag Day at the Hinman Ranch I learned a lot. One thing was how people was their clothes with a wash board it probably took a long time to wash all the clothes. Also, it would be hard to make everything with wool. It was awesome watching them make the yarn into things.

Then we got a smoothie, it was great. I think I will make it for breakfast at home. Another thing was in the shearing station. Watching Layla shear was cool. I think I want a sheep and shear it all the time. We also got a bunch of wool, it was pretty soft, it was really fun too. A super fun station was the balloons. I learned a lot about branding, like the Lazy J, and moving the balloons and separating them was fun. I popped one though at the end. At the end they popped them. I wanted to keep mine. Another reason I liked it was because of the food. It was so good I wish we could have it every day. Next, I liked the ocean station I thought there would be more water we could drink from. It is actually less than a quarter of the ocean that is not much out of the whole ocean. This is my favorite of all. It was the sand or I thought it was crushed bottle caps we built rivers and bridges. It was fun. I built a little lake. I made it flow into two rivers and the grassy one did not flow as fast as the one without grass. That's what I like about the Hinman Ranch.

MES 5th Grade Winner

Jade Imlay

On AG Day at the Hinman Ranch, I learned a lot. First of all, we learned how to shear a sheep. They laid it down and sheared it and gave us all a chunk of it. The felt felt rough, dirty, and fluffy. We then went inside and learned hot to spin felt and how to weave it. Spinning wool sounded easy but it wasn't as easy as I thought. Weaving was cool. It took patience, skills, and time. It also was cool how they dyed the wool with chokecherry berries. Next , we learned how to make a rainbow smoothie. Then we made a river better. The smoothie was delicious and easy to make. It had every color of the rainbow. The only thing I didn't like was the spinach. I couldn't taste it, but I could feel the chunks of the spinach on my tongue . It mostly tasted like strawberries and pineapple. After that we fixed a river. They used plastic bottle part for the sand. We fixed the river by adding bushes/grass and putting a dam in the river. Another thing is, we learned that we have very little water that is available to us to drink in the world. Most water is in oceans, rivers, and lakes. Then most of the water that isn't in oceans is frozen. That leaves us with very little water that we can drink. After that we dressed up and touched animal skin. I put on a outfit that looked like people that lived in Alaska, then put on a giant dress with a bonnet. They had otter, coyote, and fox fur. The fox fur was the softest in my opinion. Finally, we went to milk the cow, and it was fun. We learned that female cows have a wider stomach than males. We also learned how to make butter from cow's milk. All we had to do is shake the bottle a lot. Then the fat molecules combined and made butter. We got to have ice cream. My favorite thing we did was dressing up.