EARTH DAY

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN CYNTHIA MARTENS
Sixth-grade students from Marion County gathered on a cool and blustery day, April 24, at Marion County Reservoir to celebrate Earth Day. Information stations, set up at Cottonwood Point campgrounds, were designed to educate the sixth- graders about the importance of natural-resource conservation in the county.

Students arrived after 9 a.m. and brought sack lunches for the all-day event.

One of the stations focused on the importance of land use in the county-particularly involving crop land and grass land.

The middle-schoolers learned that 60 percent of the land in Marion County is crop land, 30 percent is grass land and 10 percent is made up of cities, roads, reservoirs and rivers. The most common crop is wheat and the second most common crop is milo.

Dale Ehlers, soil conservation technician for the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Marion County, demonstrated a rainfall simulator. Grouped around the simulator table were (left to right) Stephanie Abbott, Brittany Davis, Ehlers, and Natasha Hoffner. “This is a way we came up with making it rain on different aspects of land uses,” Ehlers said. “It simulates the effect of erosion and how we can go about controlling soil erosion in the field.”

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