My family moved to the Mississippi Delta when I was a small child.

We initially lived in Marks, Miss., where my father coached football, track, and taught science at Marks High School. My mom was a secretary for the school principal. Three years later, Dad accepted a coaching position at Coahoma County High School in Clarksdale, Miss., where we lived for five years before he was offered a position as a career counselor with the Mississippi Employment Commission, which, strangely enough, eventually landed us in Memphis, Tenn.

Despite growing up around cotton and soybeans fields in the Delta, I never gave them a second look. Being stuck driving 5 miles per hour behind a tractor pulling a planter or cotton trailer as it moved to the next field wasn’t an inconvenience, it was just something that happened periodically. Like so many people across the United States today, because my family did not make their living in agriculture, my brother and I grew up taking it for granted.

It is ironic however that I have made a living in agriculture for the last 27 years. Over those years I came to know and respect the great staff at Agricenter International, a 1,000-acre urban farm located on the outskirts of Memphis, with 600 acres dedicated to crop production and research.

Housed within the facility is University of Tennessee Extension agent Tim Roberts, who heads up the ag-centric educational programs tailored for students from pre-K through college who are so far removed from a farm their knowledge about agriculture is extremely limited.

Roberts started the programs after asking initial groups of students where we get milk. The top two answers were Kroger and Walmart. Since Robert’s arrival in 2004, over 100,000 inner city students, parents, and teachers have spent the better part of one day walking and riding on trailers pulled by a tractor to different locations around the facility learning about various aspects of agriculture.

Roberts is dedicated to the program and always receives personal satisfaction when he sees a student’s eyes light up signifying they have made a learned connection with something he has said or shown them. The educational programs are funded collaboratively through the University of Tennessee and Agricenter International.

In the summer of 2018, Roberts received the Excellence in Ag Education Award from Tennessee State University. Building on the program’s success, two additional Extension agents were added to the staff this past December. Both will focus their efforts on strengthening 4-H and Youth Educational Development curriculums.

These burgeoning programs are making an impact on today’s youth who will be tomorrow’s consumers and parents — parents who will be able to explain to their children that milk comes from a cow, and the food that provides them daily sustenance is grown from seeds planted and nurtured by a farmer.