Students and visitors to the Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park can now get a taste of where some of their food comes from thanks to a new partnership. The ranch along with Alberta Beef Producers will now provide educational programming and tours for schools and visitors to learn about grasslands and the role cattle play in its maintenance. But Alberta Beef executive Rich Smith said students also get the chance to learn more about where their groceries are produced beyond the store. "Increasingly, young children in school are not connected to agriculture and the food industry and I don't think they always understand where their food comes from and that's what we want them to learn and know about it," Smith said. "It just makes them better-informed consumers when they grow up but it also makes them have a better understanding of traditions of the province in which they live." John Copithorne, who leases the land from Alberta Parks for the ranching operation with his son, Ty, said the hands-on learning also teaches children what cattle contribute to the park. "Basically, they're out experiencing what it's like to walk through grasslands that sustain and provide food for cattle," John said. "We just give (the students) ideas of what to look for, why cattle are here, and the opportunity that cattle provide for sustainable grassland management." John explained how cattle graze on the grasslands in the park, which provides nutrients for them and in return the grazing assists with the ecosystem by staving off weeds. The program has also piqued the students' curiosity, he added. "They ask questions about how we move cattle, when do they calve, just the cycle of cow management down here and we tell them that we do it on horseback with dogs much like it was 20, 40 years ago." "Without the cattle here it would be a pretty messy place – a lot of bad weeds will run up and a lot of fire risks," Ty said. Sarah Parker, executive director of Glenbow Ranch Park Foundation, said the partnership between the ranch and Alberta Beef Producers is the perfect mix for learning about the history of ranching in Alberta. "Bison used to roam these fields and provide the grazing necessary and now they've been extirpated so cattle are necessary," Parker said. "There's a rich ranching history here. So all of that makes it a perfect partnership." "We've been able to do a lot more, they've given us a lot of great information about cattle and their role in the ecosystem, which we've been able to use in the programming as well," Parker said. "There's the field trip component like this so any school can sign up and it's about a three-and-a-half to four-hour program that they can do and in the winter months we can bring a condensed version of this to the classroom." The program is big among Cochrane and area schools too, she said. So far, there have been 16 field trips between May and June and several schedule
