The county fairs in Northwest Colorado were no doubt full of people with a good level of knowledge about the ranching and farming worlds.

But, for those who needed a little tutorial, students in the field were happy to educate.

The Colorado State University traveling program, Cam’s Agricultural Academy, set up shop during the recent county fairs in Moffat and Routt counties, with the goal of teaching people of all ages about the vital role agriculture plays in everyday lives.

Baylee McSwain and Charley Miller, both agricultural education majors at CSU, were on hand at the Moffat County Fairgrounds to share their knowledge with Cam’s Classroom — named for mascot Cam the Ram — and the Junior Ag Ambassador program.

“We have a scavenger hunt for students to go find in the livestock barn, go by each stop and write their answers down and tell us what they learned,” McSwain said. “They became ambassadors once they take the oath promising to explore agriculture, share what they learned, and be leaders in their community.”

The other half is simply testing participants’ awareness of products with true-or-false questions.

“We did corn, a cheeseburger and wool,” McSwain said. “They’re learning things like shampoo is a byproduct of wool and its oils, and corn is turned into ethanol which goes into our cars. Then with burgers, they learn that cheddar cheese is not naturally yellow, it’s dyed to be that color.”

The pair have gone around to six different county events and will be at the upcoming Colorado State Fair.

While in Craig, they had a hand from local kids including Irene Peck of the Elkhead Wranglers and a 4-H council representative.

“We also do youth development training, like with Irene here, we have her teaching some of our lessons for us and we show her how to do that and engage with people in an educational setting,” Miller said.

Miller is originally from Hotchkiss and saw more than a few familiar faces from the Western Slope in previous weeks.

She noted that some counties have a populace that are well-informed about the ag world and others less so.

Moffat County was certainly in the former category.

“We definitely had to challenge kids here more since a lot of them know you feed corn to your livestock but they don’t know about it going into ethanol,” Miller said. “In some counties, people don’t even know you can feed corn to livestock, so it’s been interesting.”

Both McSwain and Miller are aiming for careers in teaching, possibly working with Future Farmers of America.

“Ag education is very broad,” McSwain said. “We learn animal science, plant science, soil science and we do our basic education classes and also get to go into classrooms. Agricultural literacy is super-important, and I hope that in the future, more counties will invite us to their fair and more states can start doing programs like this so everyone can learn at all ages.”

Megan Stetson, Moffat County Extension director, noted that the CSU outreach helps spread the word about how beneficial programs like 4-H are.

“We were excited that we were able to have these interns come and offer this to the community,” Stetson said. “4-H is a great opportunity for kids to learn about all kinds of different things. It’s not just animals and agriculture, but they can learn family and consumer sciences. It gives them the chance to learn new skills and meet new people. It builds kids up and gives them a safe place to learn new skills and hobbies and really learn responsibilities.”