AREA GROWER OFFERS VIEW OF FARM LIFE.

Byline: Paul Bush American News Service

Concerned that even Americans descended from farming families may be three generations away from a personal link to the land, some farmers are trying to plant seeds of awareness that they hope will contribute to saving the American farm.

Farmers who run so-called educational farms are just as interested in increasing public knowledge about farming as they are in sowing crops and raising livestock.

One of the newest educational farms is Faulkner Farm in Ventura County. The 27-acre farm was purchased last June 30, through a $10 million trust fund set up by the late Thelma Hansen, an area resident. Plans for educational programs are just now being made.

Local growers have played a part in encouraging Faulkner Farm's goal of teaching the public about agriculture.

``We've got 100,000 acres of irrigated agriculture in the county and 600,000 people,'' said Link Leavens, who grows 600 acres of citrus and avocados on Leavens Ranches. If people don't learn the value of saving farmland from development, he said, ``you can blink your eyes and it will be gone.''

Leavens also hopes residents will become more tolerant of the inconveniences, such as dust and noise, that come from sharing the county with farmers. He believes that even something as minor as learning that lemon trees have large thorns may help the public understand how difficult farming can be.

Other farms around the country are opening their operations to the public. On a recent morning in rural Keene, N.H., Wendy Sedgwick's third-grade class came to Stonewall Farm for an education in maple sugaring.

Tim Jackson, age 9, enthusiastically recounted what he had learned about how Native Americans made syrup, prompting teacher Sedgwick to remark, ``It's amazing. If he'd read that, it would go right through him. But he experienced it.''

Stonewall Farm, like a growing number of farms around the United States, has been converted to educate the public about agriculture and the environment. Today, its dairy barn, where 44 Holstein cows are still milked morning and evening, looks small compared with the farm's new education center.

``Twenty years ago, agricultural education meant vocational training, teaching young people how to farm,'' said Kully Mindemann, Stonewall Farm's executive director. ``But in the last 10 years or so there's been a movement of agricultural education to bring the nonfarming public out to the farm - doing awareness, not training.''

Educational farms take a variety of forms. Twenty miles east of the White House in Washington, D.C., Claggett Farm of Upper Marlboro, Md., focuses on how agriculture affects the Chesapeake Bay. It offers its roughly 2,500 annual visitors three-day programs that begin on the farm and its salt marshes, before they go out to the bay on a fishing boat.

In Fox, Ark., the Humane Society of the United States operates 300-acre Meadowcreek Farm in the Ozark Mountains. The goal is to show its 400 visitors a year - primarily college students, community leaders and other farmers - alternatives to the intensive confinement of animals used by so-called factory farms.

``We have an interest in farm animals and their treatment,'' said Gary Valen, the Humane Society's director of sustainable agriculture. ``But you can't just tell people to treat animals humanely; you need to show them.''

The farm education movement in part has been a response to what some view as the drastic loss of farmland to rapid residential development and the suburbanization of rural areas.

Between 1982 and 1992, the most recent years for which statistics are available, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that crop land decreased by 9 percent and range land decreased by 2.4 percent while developed land increased by 19 percent.

A partial survey conducted by the University of California Cooperative Extension in 1992 found 50 educational farms across the country, and experts say the number has grown steadily in recent years.

``Every year over the last eight or 10 years the number of calls I get from farms wanting to do this kind of thing has doubled,'' said Stacy Miller, a longtime staff member at Drumlin Farm in Lincoln, Mass., which is possibly the oldest educational farm in the United States. Founded in 1955, Drumlin is operated by the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

Educational farms are usually run as nonprofit organizations, relying on admission fees or donations to cover operating costs. Some have programs that focus on showing the public how farms work, from the first planting to the last harvest. Others present a broader range of educational activities such as science projects investigating pollution.

Along with hands-on education, the goal of educational farms is to help the public understand where their food comes from and why farming is important. This is needed, said Debbie Cavallaro, program manager at Kensington Farm Center in Milford, Mich., because Americans no longer have the intimate connection with agriculture that they once did.

``A lot of people have never set foot in a barn. We're three generations removed from farming,'' said Cavallaro.