There is a new education center in the works for Wisconsin that will help educate the community about agriculture from seed to table. Malorie Paine, the Marketing and Communications Manager for the Farming for the Future Foundation says that the new Food and Farm Exploration Center in Plover, Wisconsin will help consumers better understand where their food comes from.
The center broke ground last April and has been making great progress as far as getting the building constructed. Drywall is being installed on both the first and second floors of the center and construction is moving along quickly with it set to open in August of 2023.
“Our Cultivating Connections campaign is our capital campaign to get the building constructed and be able to open in August as planned,” says Paine. “We’ve been embarking on a giving journey since March of 2020 and have raised more than $25 million so far of our $38 million goal and have just a little left to raise to hit that building goal.”
The Food and Farm Exploration Center will be a combination of things. First and foremost it will have exhibit centers and that will be broken into two kinds of categories. One gallery will be geared towards fourth grade range to adults while the other will be for the little learners. Both galleries will offer hands-on exhibits that allow attendees to get their hands dirty.
“There’s been a little bit of a gap in where the farm to table movement has taken us in that it doesn’t always cover everything that actually goes on from seed to table,” explains Paine. “So what we’re really doing is stepping in to kind of fill that gap. We’ll be covering the processing side to the distribution side and truly everything from the moment it goes in the ground to the moment it’s harvested to everything that happens after that between harvest and actually getting it to a person’s table.”
Additionally, the center will have four one-acre pivot plots that will be production fields to provide demonstrations of planting through the growing season. It will allow community members to see what is happening, how plants are growing, what kind of applications are provided during the growing season to keep plants healthy, and then harvest.
There will also be an event center with a café that is open to the public. Paine says that their hope is that it will be a space for people who are working remotely, need a meeting place, or just want to enjoy the center.
Paine adds, “We want to be really the premier resource for people to come and get that information that they can’t get in a lot of other places. Whether that’s someone who’s wanting to go into the industry but has no idea how to start, or whether that’s a seasoned professional who’s been in the industry for years. Technology is changing constantly and evolving all the time. So we really want to be a place that’s showcasing the future of farming and what all is coming down the pipe pipeline.”
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