Emily talked with Emilie Mulligan, a dairy farmer in Avon, NY about farm to school month which is in October. She takes students from local schools on a Zoom tour of her farm.
She said they hosted a tour last Wednesday and she had 9,000 students registered to take the tour. Emilie says she has two camera people helping her out throughout the tour and someone at the back end answering questions throughout as well, so it takes a team of people.
On the tour, they go through the process on how the milk gets from the farm to your kitchen table. During the tour there are live questions and during her tour she had over 200 questions asked. Emilie says it was fun to have so many questions because it shows that the students were engaged, and they were interested in learning more and they wanted to learn more.
It is not just for October. You can access videos anytime by going to americandairy.com/tours there is a list of past virtual tours. Emilie says she had done a tour last Spring that actually was viewed by all fifty states and three countries and it wasn’t all just live. After the fact, she says, people were able to view the tours. She says it is nice to reuse it and see other kids see what’s going on. Emilie says being able to do the virtual tours, we can bring more students in. She says there is no way she could host 9,000 students at the farm in a day or a week but being able to do it virtually they can see the tour and then they can actually go home, and their parents can watch it too because it is available after the fact.
For more information go to AmericanDairy.com/tours
