Taking Stock : 4-H Club Members Trot Out Their Farm Animals for Inspection by Inner-City School Students

If Beau the horse was a talking mule, he’d tell you that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

Beau was one of half a dozen farm animals surrounded Thursday by poking, squealing children at Magnolia Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles. Most of the animals belonged to young 4-H Club members from the Antelope Valley who were helping stage “Farm Day” so inner-city pupils could see horses, pigs and sheep up close.

Youngsters from both the city and the country liked what they saw.

Danny Benavides, 10, of Los Angeles, leaned into a pen to pet a furry rabbit. “I’d like to be a farmer when I grow up. I’d like to raise animals and vegetables and live on a farm. A farm sounds more peaceful,” he said.

Rachelle Caffey, 12, of the Quartz Hill 4-H Club, was inside the pen with the rabbit, two ducks and half a dozen chicks. She said she’d like to be a city girl. “I’d like to live here. There’s a lot to do. It’s exciting. It can get pretty boring in Lancaster,” she said.

About 2,000 Magnolia pupils inspected the livestock and heard a presentation on food production. Across town, a similar program was under way for another 650 children at Monte Vista Elementary School in Whittier.

Both were organized by the Los Angeles County Farm Bureau, which has displayed animals at two schools a year for seven years. “It helps kids learn that food isn’t grown in a supermarket,” said John Alesso, a Lancaster farmer who is president of the 3,600-member agricultural group.

Many inner-city children have never seen farm animals, said Richard Alonzo, assistant principal at Magnolia. “One little first-grade boy asked if the sheep here was real or fake because it looked like the seat covers in his family’s car,” Alonzo said.

Teacher Carol Irving said her first- and second-graders prepared for Thursday by building a make-believe farm with plastic animals and wooden blocks.

Older Farm Day participants said they got something out of the event, too. In the case of Lancaster rancher Janet Woods, it was a puppy.

“Somebody abandoned it on the street and kids walking to school today rescued it,” Woods said. “Their teacher lives in an apartment and couldn’t take it home. So I said I would.”

Woods, whose family owns Beau, said the 27-year-old, 1,200-pound gelding took the children’s curious poking and stroking in stride. It didn’t even bite when children examined its huge teeth.

Such gentility has not always been the case at past Farm Days, said Judi Buchinger, a state Farm Bureau leader.

“One year a big pig ate a little chicken right in front of all the kids,” Buchinger said. “The kids were horrified. We explained that animals are raised for food, not to be pets, although what the pig did wasn’t what we had in mind.”