Bringing Local Crops to the Classroom

There's nothing like hands on learning to help students remember and relate to what's being taught in the classroom. Currently, our third grade students are learning about local agriculture and farming. We're lucky to live in Butte County for lots of reasons, one of those is our bounty of local agriculture. Rice, olive oil, nuts, fruits - that's just a short list of what this region is known for.

Our students participated in Farm City Celebration and Kids Day at CSU, Chico's University Farm, where they learned about local agriculture and experienced farm life up close. To support that learning, they returned to their classrooms to make a delicious recipe featuring the local ingredients they've been learning about.

A salad using local grown rice, prunes, almonds, bacon, homemade dressing: how could this not be good? The best part is they made this recipe even better by adding a bonus ingredient. Did you know that walnuts are the third top commodity in Butte County, earning $64,420,800? Our third graders did, and that's why they added walnuts to the recipe.

We included the recipe our teachers used below. We hope you try it out sometime, and we hope you add walnuts like they did!

Sohnrey Family Foods Rice Salad with Prunes, Almonds and Bacon