AdAgrA Conference 2025: Growing Better

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

AdAgrA Kids

Paul Dysinger

Natasha Dysinger

Starting Your Very First Garden

We're going to talk about something really fun.

Are you ready to start your very own garden?

You ready to start your very, very own garden, huh?

There's a lot of you that already have a garden.

Now, how many of you kids have grown a little part of the garden that's your very own?

And some of you, maybe you can do it this next this next spring.

It's January so depending on where you live it's gonna be time to plant pretty soon.

Depending on where you live in the in the country.

Okay so let's start with a word of prayer and then we'll start talking about how to start your very own garden.

Dear Jesus please be with us now we know that you made all these plants and this wonderful food for us to enjoy and we pray that you'd help us to learn how to grow our own gardens and to be able to share that with other people to be able to bless them in Jesus name amen amen okay so when we're gonna grow our very own garden what do you think is the very first thing that you need to do?

Yeah, so make, Yes, so like make your little garden, your garden bed where you can plant in.

Who had their hands, yeah, you have your hands up.

So those are all Very, very good answers.

So, all these things are very, very important.

And right over here, you said you have to have a plan, right?

So, before we know exactly where our plants are going to go, now let me ask you a question.

How much space in the ground do you think a carrot will take up?

How much space do you think a carrot will take up?

If you're going deep into the ground, that's true, yeah, because a carrot can grow pretty long.

How much space do you think a carrot takes up?

How much space do you think a watermelon plant takes up?

They just go so far and they take up so much space.

So the first thing we have to know is, before I can even make my garden bed and know how big it needs to be, what am I going to plant there, right?

Does anybody know what these are up here on the screen?

And they're kind of got the little root going into the ground like an onion.

They look a little like turnips, but they're not a turnip.

Do you know what they taste a little bit like?

They're round like that round ball there that you see.

You pull off the skin and you cut it up and you eat it and it tastes a little bit like a broccoli.

A little bit like a little broccoli stem.

So let's talk real quick about choosing what to grow.

If you were gonna make a list of what you would like to grow, what would you like to grow?

Weston Adams

Making Your Own Varieties

All right, we're gonna talk about some exciting things.

We're gonna talk about some exciting things.

Okay, I want you to raise your hand if you have grown a tomato plant.

That's a lot of people who have grown a tomato plant.

Some of you have probably already grown something similar, but I don't have a clicker.

Do we have someone who can advance slides for me?

I don't have a clicker, So we'll get someone back here and I'm going to show you a bunch of tomato plants and then I want to tell you a little bit about how people who make new tomato varieties, how they make the new varieties because you can do some of it at home.

So let's look through some of these tomato types.

Some varieties, when they're ripe, they stay green.

There's like a chocolate, chocolate colored tomato, and I think the next 1 is our last tomato slide.

Oh that was actually the very first, 1 of the very first tomatoes that I ate out of someone's garden when I was a kid was this little yellow pear tomato.

Now you can make some varieties on your own at home and what I want to do is I want to draw a tomato family.

We're going to draw it on the board here.

So we had a few different types of tomatoes that we just saw.

And what we're going to do is we're going to draw a whole family here.

We're not going to make fancy drawings, but we're going to make real simple drawings.

So let's say right here We've got we're just gonna draw a little plant.

Okay, we've got a plant here and got a plant here, got leaves on it, a few more leaves.

Okay, so we have 2 tomato plants and oh, it got a clicker.

Now, these are 2 different types of plant, okay?

So 1 of them is producing little yellow pear tomatoes, all right?

So we're going to take a little yellow marker here and we're going to draw A pear-shaped fruit on this 1.

Now this other 1 is producing little round chocolate colored tomatoes.

So we're gonna draw our little round chocolate colored tomatoes.

So we gotta draw 2 more in the family here.

We got to draw a plant here And We've got to draw a plant here And this 1 has 2 parents also, So we're going to draw a plant here.

Now if a plant has 2 parents how do you know which 1 is the mother and which one's the father?

The last class, I heard your teacher talking about pollinators, right?

Okay, so What happens if a plant doesn't get pollinated?

So, If this plant produces a flower and it gets pollinated, if a bee flies from this plant, takes pollen and pollinates this plant, it's going to produce a fruit, right?

Katherina Daul

Blossoming Beauty

My name is Miss Katharina and I am Miss Katharina because I'm a teacher too.

Okay, well, why don't we start first with a prayer, okay?

So everybody fold your hands and close your eyes and we're going to pray.

Dear Jesus, thank you for this great day you gave us.

And thank you that we get to learn about flowers now and your beautiful creation.

All of my students, except there's 1 missing, but those are all my students, and they're all just like you kids.

And they love little, they love flowers, they love gardening.

Well, you heard that I'm a teacher, So why am I teaching about flowers?

Well, I actually work on the Bountiful Blessings Farm, too.

And you might have seen them, the Dysinger family.

And I grew the flowers this year on the farm.

And they sell them to customers and markets.

So right now I'm just going to show you a little short talk about growing flowers.

So I want you to make sure that you have listening ears because I'm gonna have a quiz at the end.

So you've got to listen, though, because otherwise you won't be able to play the game if you don't listen.

So do you, so we have to know how to grow flowers, right?

So what's the first thing you do to grow a flower?

You plant the seed, just like any other vegetable, right?

Like what if I put them right here on the ground?

Okay, so you got to put them in good soil, right?

Okay, and then so you plant them and then you water them.

But should I pour like a bucket of water on it?

I mean, it won't even turn into anything, right?

So we have to just put a little bit of water.

I mean, not over water for sure, because otherwise it'll wash away.

Who likes flowers who likes to watch flowers growing?

And then you harvest them or you pick them.

And then what should you do with the flowers?

Give them away to people who need a smile, right?

I don't think there's anybody who doesn't like flowers, right?

So I have them planted, and there's actually little tiny soil blocks.

Okay, well, I'm going to show you what it looks like.

Elizabeth Harrison

Feathered Friends Fun

How many of you have seen chickens before?

Now raise your hand if you have chickens or have had chickens?

All right, how many of you would like chickens someday?

If you have chickens, how many more, how many of you would like more chickens?

I always raise my hand for that 1 because I love, you know, too many chickens.

How many of you have seen the baby chicks before when they're really little, they're really tiny?

They're fluffy, like little cotton balls.

But did you know that chickens speak their own language?

Did you know that when they talk to each other, they know exactly what the other 1 is saying?

Guess how many words are in their language?

I think that's probably too much, but guess how many?

It's about 20 words per chicken language.

Each bird has their own different number, but chickens are 20.

Now, did you know, now this may surprise you, did you know that we can learn to speak chicken to a certain degree?

I know we can't know exactly what they're saying, but we can learn what they're trying to communicate by spending time with them.

The more we spend time with them, you'll recognize what kind of sounds they're making to express what they are trying to say.

And I will tell you some of that today when we go through our time to get it.

So are you ready to find out how to speak chicken?

So let's first go what we should do when we first get baby chicks.

So when they're babies they're really tiny, right?

They don't take up much space, but they do need a home, right?

So when you go to your local farm store or you can order chicks online, they come in this little box and I'll show you what that looks like.

And when you bring them home, they need a place to be.

They're not big enough to go outside yet because they'll get too cold.

They need to grow out their big feathers and they're just little tiny things.

So for the first few weeks of their life, they need to have something called a brooder.

And you can make it really simple with a little plastic bin like this or you can use a little kiddie pool.

And what you want to do is you want to put newspaper or paper bags underneath those shavings.

Because if you don't, then they're going to flip their feet on the plastic because they're gonna scratch and then they're going to slip and then they could hurt themselves.

But they need a little bit of traction so the newspaper or something and then you can see look at all those pine shavings.

That will help them when they go to the bathroom that it doesn't make as much of a mess.

And then when they're little they need they get cold very quickly.

Well what helps them is they need something called a heat lamp or a bruder plate.

See that kind of fun looking thing with the red diamond thing?

So I don't really use heat lamps because they can get too toasty and I don't want to worry about turning them into fried chicken.

So I want to keep them warm but not too warm.

So what I use is a brooder plate and it's a set temperature.

It's not too hot and they can kind of come and go as they want.

And so I find that this works really well.

I've used this a couple different times when I've gotten chickens.

Well, we need to give them food and water so that you can get these things called, these little containers that you can fill with water so they can dip their beaks in and then they get to eat and drink and they grow to be nice strong chickens.

And then when they go to the bathroom, how many of you have cats?

You know like there's a little kitty litter scoopers, right?

Actually you can use 1 of them to sift out their potty stuff that they do in their brooder.

So it kind of keeps it a little bit more clean because you don't want it'll smell.

Trust me it gets really stinky if you don't clean it.

So this is what they look like underneath that brooder plate.

So they kind of put their backs up against it so it keeps them nice and toasty.

If they get too hot and they say, oh it's too much like summer in here, They can go out and they can cool off.

But the first week they may need more heat.

But then every week after that as they get bigger and stronger, their feathers are starting to come in, you can kind of raise that plate up a little bit and they don't need as much heat.

So the biggest difference between the heat lamps is just the whole space is being heated by a lamp and they don't have a lot of place to escape.

Whereas this is just in 1 little corner of the brooder and they can kind of walk away as they please and they can cool off.

Okay, picking up my chick at the local farm store.

So that is me and my first batch of chickens.

I went to my local farm store and I picked up 10 chickens and I only wanted hens, only girls.

Now, sometimes you will end up with a rooster, and I ended up with 1.

But you can go to your local farm store, or then the next year, you might hear of this whole thing called chicken math.

You only want to get 10 but then you love them so much and you end up getting more.

Anyway it's a very slippery slope but it's a very cool thing.

So I ordered my next batch and see that yellow big looking thing?

She doesn't look very terrifying now, she's a baby.

But she, when she grows up, she has a purpose and she will protect the flock from predators like hawks and fox.

I'll tell you some cool stories about her later, but yes.

Franklin Cobos

Fun Numbers for Families

Our seminar today is called Fun with Numbers.

Because I want to show you how you can just use your head.

I had suggested, I don't know if your parents told you, but in the class description, I suggested that as long as you could do a couple things, everything would be just fine today in the class.

As far as being able to do math without a calculator.

And to do math in parts of your life that hopefully you'll find interesting or useful in your garden or at your home or your homestead.

How many of you here can multiply the numbers 1 through 10?

Now there'll be a couple problems that we might use something like 12, 24, 8, 16.

Might even do some longer digits too, but a lot of those extra digits are gonna be zeros.

As long as you know your times tables, I think you'd be fine.

Everybody know how many seconds there are in a minute?

And how many minutes there are in an hour?

You can convert from minutes and seconds and things, right?

And you know what a dollar is, don't you?

That's important to know if you pay tithes.

So if you get a dollar, how much tithe do you pay?

You just change where the 0 is, or the decimal point.

You don't need a calculator for that, do you?

You know how many quarters in a dollar, right?

So, if none of those things confused you, nothing we talk about today should be out of your reach.

Like, phew, I was afraid I was going to get a bad grade today.

And I'll walk you through how you can handle numbers in your head.

So if you don't have a pencil or paper or pen or a teacher, it really won't matter.

Now the sheet we're going to start with, you have 1 sheet.

The side we're going to start on first is the 1 with the squares on it.

It says areas, squares, volumes, and time.

So if you move to the country, yes, a question.

I like your brother too, so I'm going to give people who came in late some handouts.

And raise your hand if you don't have 112345678.

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