As the weather warms up and the grass begins to turn green, school groups will begin doing farm tours. With today’s school children at least three generations removed from the farm, hosting a farm tour is more valuable than ever. When you host a farm tour, be sure to target your message to your audience. Each age group will be interested in different parts of the farm tour. Most importantly, assign one person to walk with the adults in the back. They usually have the most questions and are in charge of purchase decisions at the grocery store.

• Young children (under age 6) will share highlights of their day with their parents. What is that one memorable moment they’ll shout out as they get off the bus?
  
  
• School-age children (ages 7-12) understand processes like how milk is made and gets to their table. Make sure to include what happens to milk from cow to glass.
  
  
• Teens balance what they learn with misinformation they are subjected to on social media. Offer additional resources, such as your farm page, on social media to balance the story.

Before hosting a farm tour, brush up on key dairy farming messages about the dairy community. Here are some more tips for hosting a farm tour, no matter the age of the participants.

• Talk in simple terms. Try to limit your use of industry jargon, and define any words that the students may not know. 
  
  
• Keep the tour moving. Don’t spend too much time in one place. Younger children have shorter attention spans. Older school groups may have more questions in one area than another; offer to field more questions at the end of the tour.
  
  
• Use facts and figures accompanied by analogies. For example, instead of saying how many gallons of water per day cows drink, say that cows drink about a bathtub full of water each day. For the older school groups, help them understand dairy farming with a sense of scale. For example, there are just under 1.3 million dairy cows in Wisconsin. That’s one cow for every 26 acres in the state.

Visit the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board website to find dairy farm tour resources. You can also request educational materials for your guests to take home.