Tennessee Teacher Wins National Ag Award
Beverly Hall of Baxter, Tennessee, has been named AG CONNECT Expo “Ag Woman of the Year,” one of the expo’s “Advocating for Agriculture” awards. AG CONNECT Expo 2011 is an agriculture trade show exhibition being held in Atlanta, January 8-12, 2011, at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
The “Advocating for Agriculture” awards recognize those who support “in a compelling way the work of farmers and ranchers to provide abundant and affordable food and fiber.” More than 12,500 votes were cast online for the nine finalists.
Watch Hall’s video below, courtesy of advocating4ag’s YouTube channel.
Hall’s family has farmed in Tennessee for five generations, and she has been an educator for more than 20 years, serving agriculture in both Illinois and Tennessee. While teaching in Putnam County, Tennessee, Hall planted grains and vegetables indoors to engage students in agriculture basics.
Through her leadership, farmers brought in pigs, ducks and horses to school; they even hatched chickens at school so the students could watch new life in action. She later built an outdoor garden with raised beds for vegetables, herbs and other crops. This taught the students, as well as their parents, about the importance of agriculture, and helped many families in this low-income area learn to grow food.
Hall has conducted workshops sharing information about ag and gardening lessons, and she won the 2006 Excellence in Teaching Ag Award for Tennessee and presented at a national conference for Ag in the Classroom. Hall’s after-school agriculture program is expanding to other schools in Tennessee. The Tennessee Commissioner of Agriculture liked her school garden and after-school programs enough to create state funding for teaching about food and fiber.
See coverage of the awards in Atlanta on January 7 at www.agwired.com.
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