Dairy motivates learning about nature's cycles

By Gary Raham
Wellington Correspondent

"What does this smell like?" asked Vicky Jordan, eighth grade science teacher at Wellington Junior High, as she stands in the cow barn at La Luna Dairy on County Road 9 urging students to scoop up and sniff a handful of freshly composted soil.

"It smells like dirt," one student responded, exhaling a puff of warm breath on a cold and rainy Monday morning. "Exactly!" Jordan said. "It's no longer cow manure, but rich dirt after the composting process that goes on over there," she continues, pointing toward the area where dairy farm waste is mixed with leaf and yard waste to accelerate nature's recycling processes.

"I love to be able to make real-world connections for the kids," Jordan said earlier, referring to science lessons on carbon, nitrogen and water cycling that could seem like just a bunch of rather abstract formulas in the classroom.

In the past, Jordan has led several field trips to the sewage treatment plant, the recycling center, the landfill and other areas to make her points. Over the last three years, with the help of a grant from the Bohemian Foundation (see www.bohemianfoundation.org), the generous cooperation of the dairy owned by Jon Slutsky and his wife, Susan Moore, and experts from Colorado State University, Jordan has been able to summarize a lot of science concepts all in one place.

In the milk barn, for example, Dr. Noa Roman-Muniz, DVM, talks about milk --a great reservoir of nitrogen in protein and carbon in milk sugars-- and how the dairy's 1,300 cows squirt out 75 pounds of this important food per cow every day. (Students must also do the math to calculate total milk output.)

In the break room, Josh Breck from MouCo Cheese Co. Inc. (www.MouCo.com) describes the friendly molds and bacteria so important in turning milk curds into delicious cheeses, yogurt and other milk products. The students get to sample a sliver of Camembert cheese on their way to the next station, and they get a free cheese round at the end of the day.

CSU veterinarian Dr. John Wenz covers the intricacies of cow feeding, nutrition and diseases. Among the latter is bloat, a painful condition caused by pent up cow burps that can sometimes lead to serious breathing difficulties.

Not only do cows convert grasses to lots of meat and milk protein, the gases of cows and other ruminants add lots of methane to the atmosphere.

Some odiferous cow gases often earn poor report cards for dairies from their neighbors living downwind. La Luna has found a technique that greatly alleviates these problems with the help of former CSU professor Tim Stanton. He has implemented a process developed by AgSmart (www.agsmart.com) that uses algae to accelerate aerobic (oxygen-using) decomposition of solid wastes. Anaerobic (non-oxygen using) microbes produce the ammonia and sulfur dioxide that wrinkles people's noses. These biological processes of respiration and fermentation, central to Jordan's scientific lessons in nature's element recycling, can be verified by what students see, smell and hear as they tour La Luna's facilities.

"To me, it is a better way of learning on a field trip than in the classroom," said science student Sheldon Herbert, "because in the classroom, you sit and listen to the teacher go 'blah, blah, blah,' but on the field trip you listen to the teacher and see examples of what you're learning."

"When students see the cows eating the nitrogen-based feed that makes protein, listen to the machines getting nitrogen-based milk out of a cow, taste nitrogen-based cheese, smell nitrogen-based manure, feel nitrogen-based compost that then gets spread back onto fields to grow more nitrogen-based crops to feed the cattle, then students truly understand the nitrogen cycle!" Jordan said. "Their awareness often leads to actions such as starting a family compost bin."

Jordan's approach to teaching science, enlisting the willing resources of a community to show students how they fit into the big picture, is banishing academic blahs at Wellington Junior High School.