 Hi, my name is Skylar Fulter and I work with Bifresh by Local Nebraska here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I'm the program coordinator of the program. We support local food producers from small to medium scale growers to farm to table restaurants all the way to suppliers for local produce and grocery stores. We were awarded a Youth Educator Sierra Grant in 2017 and it was an awesome opportunity to take youth, mostly high school students to visit farms in the area. So we got to see certified organic farms, we got to see aquaponics gardens and they had flowers and fish and showing students, I guess, really where does your food come from because there's really deficit in food knowledge these days and disconnection of youth and food. More people are living in cities, even in rural cities and they haven't seen the tops of a turnips. What does that look like? Why do we need the soil? Why is it important? Through the Sierra Grant we worked with over 200 youth from three different schools and it was over the course of a school year. The age groups were probably between 15 and 22, most were high school age, sophomore, junior and senior, but then we did some engagement with college classes as well. Kids really like seeing livestock and so we visited a farm where they had bindweed issue, which is a common issue and the farmer brought pigs onto the land to help remedy that situation and the students got to see, you know, why somebody might not grow, why they might raise not hogs exclusively, why you might have a system that's diversified and where you have pigs and chickens and crops, vegetables all in one system. Another part of the grant is we visited, so I visited several culinary arts classrooms and we went to a farmer's market and toured farmer's markets with some students and the teacher actually brought local food back to the classroom, could tell the story of the farm or how it got there and then show them, or, you know, they together cooked things like ramen with white turnips and with heart carrots and things like that that really I think engage students on a level more than just a presentation because eating is so visceral and really connects us back to the land.