Eve Copeland/The Tifton GazetteStudents learned about aquaponics at the event.

TIFTON — Third grade students from Len Lastinger, Omega Elementary, Northside Primary and Cook County Elementary Schools were at the University of Georgia’s Tifton campus for its annual Agricultural and Environmental Awareness Day on May 3.

The event is held twice a year, once in spring and again in the fall. Students visit a variety of different stations to learn about planting and other spring season topics.

The first Agricultural and Environmental Awareness Day was organized by Benjie Baldree in 2001.

The stations included touring the Future Farmstead, drones, pecans, fungi, aquaponics, magnets, cotton and peanut planting, supply and demand, popcorn, monarch butterflies as pollinators, lunchtime for plants, Ag/Enviro Jeopardy and putting trash in its place.

Students were able to learn about and see peanuts and cotton being planted, discover how seeds become plants and how plants eat.  

Advances in technology were also on display at the event.

Drones and their uses in agriculture was a popular station, as was the future farmstead, which showed the students energy saving and reducing building methods and materials.

Aquaponics showed them a different way of growing crops, and the students were able to put their knowledge to the test during Ag/Enviro Jeopardy.

The students will return in the fall as fourth graders to learn about harvesting the crops they saw and helped plant in the spring.