What the Family Studies?
What the Family Studies?
Teaching Food Literacy Through Real Farms
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Curiosity can shift a classroom, but access transforms it. We sit down with Kelly Daynard, executive director of Farm and Food Care Ontario, to unpack how family studies educators can move beyond food myths and give students a clear view of Canadian agriculture. From anxiety about additives to confusion over animal welfare and biotechnology, we trace why fears grow when fewer Canadians live on farms—and how direct farmer voices change the conversation.
We walk through practical tools you can use tomorrow. FarmFood360’s virtual tours bring mushroom farms, dairy barns, and orchards to any device, while live field trips let students ask farmers questions in real time. Pair these experiences with Agscape and Agriculture in the Classroom Canada’s curriculum-linked activities to teach sustainability, supply chains, soil health, and food safety with confidence. We also dive into The Real Dirt on Farming, a research-backed guide that tackles hot-button topics—organic and conventional systems, climate-smart practices, food waste, and the realities of buying local—so inquiry projects rest on credible evidence.
Careers get a spotlight too. Agriculture today spans coding, drone imaging, dietetics, food styling, and sustainability analytics, with four jobs waiting for every agriculture grad at the University of Guelph. As our markets diversify, Ontario’s sector is testing crops like okra and eggplant, expanding lamb and goat farming, and sharing recipes that reflect new Canadians’ traditions. The biggest takeaway might be the most human: 97% of Canadian farms are family-owned or family-run, innovating fast while holding generations of stewardship.
If you teach food and nutrition—or simply want your students to trust what’s on their plate—this conversation arms you with sources, stories, and step-by-step ideas. Explore FarmFood360, Real Dirt on Farming, and Faces Behind Food, then bring those voices into your lessons. You can link to these amazing resources at https://www.farmfoodcareon.org/educators-guides/
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Meet Kelly Daynard And FFC Ontario
SPEAKER_01Welcome back to another episode of What the Family Studies, the podcast where we explore the real-world connections behind the Family Studies courses we teach in Ontario classrooms. I'm your host, Catherine Murphy, and today we're diving into a topic of interest to all who teach food and nutrition courses. How do we help students truly understand where their food comes from and why does that matter now more than ever? To help us explore this, we're joined by someone who works on the front lines of food literacy and agriculture education in Ontario, Kelly Daynard, the Executive Director of Farm and Food Care Ontario, an organization dedicated to building public trust in food and farming through education, storytelling, and direct connections with real farmers. Kelly and her team support national resources like the Real Dirt on Farming, immersive virtual farm tours like Farm 360, and live experiences that bring farmers directly to students, all of which can significantly enrich the Family Studies curriculum. Kelly, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. Kelly, I want to dive right into this because this is really interesting, I think, for any of us who who teach food and nutrition courses. As Family Studies educators, we are tasked with building food literacy in a fast-changing food landscape. Now, how can Farm and Food Care Ontario partner with teachers to strengthen students' understanding of agriculture, sustainability, and the real story behind Canadian food production?
Why So Many Myths About Food
SPEAKER_02You know, I think it starts with a genuine desire to uh to have your students uh know more about where their food comes from. And I guess I'm lucky. I was raised on a farm, my grandparents had farms. I grew up never knowing anything else until I went to university. And it was at university that I was that lone farm kid in the classroom and suddenly realized that the world I had grew up in, that I just took for granted, was actually a bit of a black hole, so to speak, for most of my university classmates. And you know, many of them, we've had many conversations over the decades since we graduated, but most of them have no idea how far back their farming ancestors were, whether it's three generations more than that. And so I suddenly, I guess that's where the desire for this career started was I was suddenly the girl that they were asking questions of about where their food came from. And it gave me a lot of pride in being able to answer questions about Canadian farms and food producers. And I guess in my career since, uh, that's what I've I've kind of devoted my career to is answering people's questions and trying to make sure that there are sources out there if people want more information. And, you know, we have a, I'll give a huge plug to start, and I'm probably going to mention them many times through this, but we have a wonderful sister group in Ontario called Agscape. Nationally, there's a group called Agriculture in the Classroom Canada. They are entirely devoted to classroom programming about agriculture, and so the work I do and the work they do, I think really provides a wonderful basis for your members and anybody who does want to know more about food.
SPEAKER_01I think um Egscape is an organization that we have um talked about before. I know as family studies teachers and through um, you know, the Facebook pages, the online communities that we have. It's a really great organization. So I'm really glad to hear that you guys partner with them. You mentioned earlier, too, before we started recording, that you had taken some family studies courses when you were younger, when you were in high school, and that you really enjoyed them. I want to talk to you a bit a little bit about you know, those students that we see coming into our classroom on a daily basis. They come into our classes with some serious misconceptions about food, like some real fears about food additives, um, confusion about farming practices and the way things are done on farms. What are some of the most common myths um that you can encounter? And how can teachers use Farm and Food Care Ontario resources to help students evaluate food information critically and confidentially too?
SPEAKER_02Oh my gosh, that's a half-hour answer if I've uh if I've got the time to give it. But uh, you know, it is uh it is nobody's fault that they don't know where their food comes from. And in this day, uh, when I think it's now one in 61 Canadians lives on a farm. I don't live on a farm anymore. My my elderly parents still live on my family farm, but I live in the in the city of Guelph and and you know spend every day out on farms. But um, there are so many misconceptions, and I think you know, we've often talked in agriculture about how we're living in a time where food has never been safer, but yet where people have never been more afraid of their food. And um, you know, all of the misinformation, disinformation that's out there, if you don't know about a topic, if you don't know where, you know, cows live or where milk comes from or how your eggs are produced, I think you can you can buy into the fear and you can often worry about it. And then people are often thinking, well, I don't know where to find an accurate source for information about agriculture. How do I, you know, weigh out the the good information from the bad and really find a source that is going to give me the answers I need. And so, what we've always said at Farm and Food Care, and I would say the same for AgScape, our sister group on the classroom side, is that we've always said if you want to know more about food and farming, why wouldn't you go straight to the source? And so we both represent farmers and agribusinesses and processors, food processors across Ontario. We have sister groups across Canada, and we all have that mandate to bring accurate information, and there are really, really great sources on the AgScape side. There are also really great teacher ambassadors that will come into your classrooms to do presentations on any sort of a variety of topics based on whatever you're teaching in your curriculum.
Go Straight To The Source
Virtual Tours And FarmFood360
SPEAKER_01I love what you said at the beginning there about food has never been more safe, but maybe never more confusion around the food that we eat. So that's that's great. I think you're right, heading back to you know to the roots and finding out the information for that. Um in our classrooms virtually, we can do that too, can't we? With virtual farm tours, farm 360, live mini field trips to give our students real-time access to farmers and and modern agriculture. How can family studies teachers use those tools to connect those curriculum expectations to real-world food production? And then we want to help students see beyond stereotypes that we might see with our food.
SPEAKER_02That's those are great questions. So we um recognize that farm and food care and agscape as two tiny Canadian charities will never have the capacity to take every single person in Canada out to a farm or in Ontario out to a farm, even though I just think the magic happens when somebody meets a new lamb for the first time or sees a soybean plant in the in the field. I still get jazzed watching those uh interactions happen. But we launched a website, actually, we launched the predecessor to this website 20 years ago, but technology is magical and ever-changing, and so in 2016 and and since we have been going out and filming Canadian farms virtually. I've been part of almost every one of the photo shoots, so I can certainly attest to their validity, but recognizing that a lot of people aren't going to get into farms for biosecurity purposes or because it's a long way to come from a city, and how do you know who the farmer is that's opening their doors? And so we now have this amazing website called farmfood360.ca where people can go and tour farms virtually. If you have the Oculus goggles or the 360 goggles, you can put them on and take that real farm tour and immerse yourself in the experience, but it's also really really accessible from a regular laptop computer or your phone as well. We then work really closely with Agriculture in the Classroom Canada. They put together the educator resources that accompany those Agatha Classroom Canada national organization, so they are making sure that every one of their activities is uh is curriculum-linked depending on what you're teaching in your classrooms. And then I'll jump one step further and then take a breath. But um, during the pandemic, like everybody else, we had to figure out a new way of doing things, and farm and food care is really known for our experiential learning. We, you know, host big events every year called Breakfast on the Farm, where we'll host 3,000 people to a breakfast, and we couldn't do that for a few years. So we now host regular virtual field trips, also in partnership with Aggscape, and we will go live for 45 minutes or an hour once or twice a month, and it's just a farmer walking around their farm with a smartphone answering questions of the classroom in real time, and we've seen a huge amount of success. Teachers like logging in with their entire classrooms to visit that apple orchard, that mushroom farm, that chicken barn, etc. And those have been a really interesting new way of communicating in a really economical fashion.
Live Field Trips And Classroom Links
The Real Dirt On Farming Resource
SPEAKER_01That's fantastic. And you know, when you say you get jazzed about those sorts of things, I get jazzed when I go into my backyard and I see, you know, the seedlings that I've planted that are starting to take my little tomato plants or something like that. So when we head out to those big farms and we see that on a really large, much larger level, that's pretty fascinating too. That's that's really cool stuff. So you know, we can't get all of our students out to the farm for lots of reasons, but you guys have a great resource called The Real Dirt on Farming. And so it's gonna answer some tough questions about our food systems, things like animal welfare, biotechnology that you touched on a little bit, sustainability, those sorts of things. What sections of the Real Dirt on Farming do you think resonate most with teens? And how might a teacher weave lessons, inquiry-based learning into their classroom with it?
SPEAKER_02Super. Thank you for uh bringing up that booklet because it's a it's a publication we're really proud of. We published the first edition in 2006, so we are coming up to this is our 20th anniversary, and our seventh edition will be out this year. There isn't a national organization called the Canadian Center for Food Integrity, and we work really closely with that organization as well. And one of their areas of expertise is research, consumer research. So every year they pull a couple thousand Canadians from coast to coast and they say, What are your top questions about food and farming? What would you like to know about? What are you worried about? What are the trends you're following? And they just do an amazing job of focus group testing of kind of the pulse of Canadians at that moment related to food and farming. And then we are able to access that research and we write this real dirt on farming booklet every three years to answer those commonly asked questions about food and farming. So it could be, you know, what is um, where do cows live? What's the difference between organic and conventional? Why do farmers care about soil health? What is no tillage? What is urban farming? Um, you know, what are some of the new emerging crops in Canada that are being grown for a new Canadian that's coming here from their country, seed to their crops, and can they find them here? So we're really proud of that booklet. It's online at real dirtonfarming.ca. But then again, giving a plug back to our sister groups, we then work with Agriculture in the Classroom Canada on an educator guide. It is high school level. It is a button accessible right from that real dirtonfarming.ca website, and that takes you through the entire booklet as a teacher and gives you kind of curriculum links and and topics, you know, um climate change, food waste, you know, environmental programming on farms, animal welfare, all of the kind of key topics right now, our new edition as it's shaping out will be a lot on, you know, how do you know your product is Canadian? How do you how do you emphasize buying local? What does that mean for your budget? That sort of thing. So we really, really try to kind of tackle the emerging issues and the issues that people worry about in that booklet. And we're not afraid to tackle tough topics.
Careers Across Modern Agriculture
SPEAKER_01Those are all topics that I think just even our own in our own homes, we're concerned with and we're thinking about. And in our classrooms, we're bringing those in too. And I know when I teach food and nutrition, talking to my students about the conversations that they're having at home with their families. So I think that's a really great resource for these students to take a look at and even to bring home to their families to have these conversations and and to be educated so that they can have really great, great conversations at home with their family and understand what's going on. In that vein, and looking at understanding what's going on with our our food pathways and career pathways in agriculture. So lots of agriculture are lots of food career pathways out there, nutritionists, food scientists, drone technologists, even software developers, of course, sustainability, all those sorts of things. Those career pathways in agriculture, do you wish that more families students knew about them? And how can teachers highlight them and highlight the diversity of these careers?
SPEAKER_02Oh my gosh, it's such a good question. And I would say that most of us working in agriculture did not choose this as a career path. Maybe it chose us. And I'll use me as an example. I was the girl that uh probably didn't have as much of an interest um in pursuing my family's farming background. You know, every typical kid wants to get off the farm and see the world, and uh, but farming has a way of pulling you back in. And uh, I have now worked in agricultural communications for 25 years, but I thought I was gonna be a librarian, and so um anyway, you know, started writing a little bit more, started uh working as a newspaper reporter, found I was writing more of the farm stories because I really love telling those stories, but I think too many people picture career in farming as being a farmer, and in this day and age, nothing could be further from the truth. The University of Guelph reports that there are four jobs waiting for every one of its graduates from from an agricultural program when they finish school, and so there are just massive opportunities and uh really unique ones. So you mentioned drone technology, that's a huge one now. We're hearing that some of the you know the John Deers of the world are advertising for employees at gaming conferences, because if you've ever looked at the console of a million-dollar combine, it really does take a rocket scientist to figure it out and run with it. So there's just so many things. I do a lot of work in the food world with food industry professionals, whether they're um teachers like yourself, whether they're registered dietitians, whether they're home economists, whether they're recipe developers, food stylists, and every one of them, totally different career, but such a meaningful one. And really the sky's the limit. We have had five co-op students the last five years at Farm and Food Care. I think all of them found us by accident. None were from Farm Worlds, but I think all of them now are thinking, oh, well, there's there's some cool opportunities there.
Adapting To New Canadians’ Food Needs
SPEAKER_01It's a really important industry in students to get into these different careers and to follow these pathways. Our food markets, as well as our classrooms, they are diversifying very, very rapidly. So, how is Ontario's agriculture sector adapting to meet the needs of new Canadians? And how can educators use this shift to spark discussions about culture, food traditions, local food systems in our classrooms? I love that.
SPEAKER_02I have been lucky enough to be able to visit some of the crop research stations in uh in Ontario through my role-up farm and food care and to see some of the research that's being done into some really neat emerging markets. Crops like okra or eggplant that they might you know have traditionally brought in from uh from you know imported in. We're doing a lot of research to see if they can be adapted for a Canadian climate. The lamb industry is one of those that's that has a lot of opportunity because uh a lot of ethnic markets really value um lamb and goat meat, and there's not enough in in Canada to supply that demand. So you're seeing real growth in those areas. But I think also um I do a lot of work in the in the livestock sectors, and you're seeing work to you know prepare products in a way that maybe a new Canadian might better recognize. They're not used to maybe cooking a whole turkey at Thanksgiving, for example, as we might be used to doing. They might be used to preparing something different. So, how can we, you know, really diversify recipes that we are promoting in things like the milk calendar or local cookbooks? And um I just think the sky's the limit. And I think that that kind of new new emerging crops or cuts of meat, for example, are really exciting and provide really great new opportunities for Canadian farmers as well.
The Takeaway: Family Farms And Innovation
SPEAKER_01I think it really gives uh put puts a lot of faith in our future for me, right? To think about all these position positions that these these students can take and and run with and these ideas that they're gonna have. It's it's it's just gonna get better than what it is right now, for sure. Absolutely. Before we close though, I really I want to ask you if every family studies student in Ontario could walk away with one key understanding about Canadian agriculture, what would you want that to be? What is most important to you?
SPEAKER_02My favorite statistic, if you'll uh humor me to give a statistic, is that 97% of Canadian farms are still family-owned or family-run. And uh I've been lucky enough to travel the world in my career and uh learned about agriculture on every continent. And I'm always so proud to come home to Canada and especially to Ontario because uh we are not a corporate farming world here in Ontario. Our our food is produced by family farmers, just like my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins. You know, farmers work really hard and are always looking for ways to innovate. So, you know, my 84-year-old father, who is still farming, uses a drone to scout for weeds now. And uh, oh my gosh, my grandparents would just shake their heads if they were still alive and could see that. But, you know, you just see farmers, you see not a lot more women farmers too, and I love that. I was interviewing a female sheep farmer from the London area today, and she was talking about how much she loves working with that smaller breed of livestock and and her vision for um the future in that industry, and then you know, just there's just so many passionate people, they really do want to tell their stories and want questions to be asked for of them, and um, there's lots of ways of connecting with them. I'll give one more plug. We have an Instagram and Facebook account called Faces Behind Food, and you just have to search for that. And we're always trying to tell the stories of people working in really innovative careers in uh Canadian agriculture, and so that might give people some ideas as well.
SPEAKER_01Faces behind food, right? Faces behind food. Perfect. I'm gonna have to look that one up for sure. Um, I am shocked by that number though. 97% are still family-owned farmed in Ontario. I didn't think it was that high.
SPEAKER_02It makes me really proud of that number because I think a lot of people, you know, they they hear things like corporate farming or whatnot, and Canada is still very much the food in Canada is produced by family farms like the one that I grew up on.
Resources, Next Guest, And Closing
SPEAKER_01That's amazing. That's really wonderful to know. Kelly, thank you so much for sharing your insights and helping us connect the dots between agriculture, food literacy, and the work we do in our family studies classrooms every day. For teachers listening, you can explore all the resources mentioned, including Farm 360, virtual field trips, and the real dirt on farming at farmfoodcareon.org. We'll also link everything in the show notes too. And if you've enjoyed this episode of What the Family Studies, next month we're chatting with Denise Hamburger, the executive director of Be Real. We'll dive into body image, eating disorder prevention, and ways we can help young people build a healthier relationship with food and their bodies. Don't forget to follow, rate, and share the podcast so more educators can deepen their practice and stay connected with our teaching community. Until our next episode, May your lessons land, your discussions spark, and your marking piles stay manageable. Thanks so much for joining us.
SPEAKER_00What the Family Studies is brought to you by the Ontario Family Studies Home Economics Educators Association. Special thanks to our producer, Michelin Galant, editor Charlie Rogers, and our host, Catherine Murphy.
