Laning Wins Contest About NJ Farms

The New Jersey Agricultural Society recently announced the winners of its annual Farm-City Week Poster Contest from Laning Avenue School.

This year’s theme for the poster and essay contest was “The Garden State On My Plate.” The students were asked to highlight some of the many fruits and vegetables grown in New Jersey and explain why it is important to eat these fruits and vegetables every day.

Students in kindergarten through fifth grade from 18 New Jersey schools participated in the poster contest. The New Jersey Agricultural Society chose one contest winner from each school at each grade level. Then from those winners, a statewide grand prize winner was chosen for each grade level.

The poster contest winners from Laning Avenue School are:

First Grade: Madeleine Nogales
Second Grade: Corinne Mullings
Third Grade: Victor Paz
Fourth Grade: Ryan Tsang

The annual poster contest is part of the New Jersey Agricultural Society’s Learning Through Gardening program, which provides materials to schools to build vegetable gardens that are used as outdoor classrooms. The program also provides training and curriculum to teachers to assist them in including garden activities in their everyday lessons in all subjects. School gardens show students where their food comes from and how plants grow. The garden programs also encourage students to eat healthy food, as the students are able to eat the vegetables they grow at school. The Learning Through Gardening Program currently supports gardening in 31 schools throughout New Jersey in its three-year program. Since its inception in 2002, The Learning Through Gardening Program has started gardens in 76 New Jersey schools, reaching 54,000 students.

The Learning Through Gardening program is one of three New Jersey Agricultural Society programs. The others are Farmers Against Hunger and the Agricultural Leadership Development Program. Farmers Against Hunger is a program dedicated to collecting fresh fruits and vegetables from farms, wholesalers, and food distributors across the state and distributing that food to people in need. The Agricultural Leadership Development program is an educational program for individuals involved in farming and agribusiness to help them become informed, articulate leaders.