Louisa to host a book barn-raiser

Children visiting the Louisa County Public Library will soon enjoy a barn stocked with books on agriculture.
The Louisa County Farm Bureau Women’s Committee and the county’s Future Farmers of America alumni chapter will dedicate a “learning barn” to the library on Wednesday. The barn-shaped bookshelf will contain more than a dozen children’s books focusing on various aspects of agriculture.

The bookshelf will be dedicated in honor of the late former Del. V. Earl Dickinson. Dickinson, who died June 15, 2006, served in the House of Delegates for 30 years. He helped to secure $300,000 in state funding to complete the library construction in the late 1990s.
“[Dickinson] was always a champion for public libraries,” said Faye Rosenthal, the Louisa County trustee on the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library’s board. “Every session he spoke up for the libraries and the need to maintain state aid for books. [He] was also a strong supporter of agriculture and the rural way of life.”
Learning barns are being built by farm bureaus nationwide as a way to get agriculture into the classroom. Some farm bureaus have created traveling bookshelf units that go from school to school, while others have built permanent bookshelves.

Across Virginia, there are almost 200 learning barns in public schools and libraries. FFA alumni members in Louisa looked at various bookshelf “blueprints” before coming up with their own.
The 4-foot-wide bookshelf has a silo attached for extra book shelving and is decorated to look like a barn. While FFA alumni members built the bookshelves, students in Louisa County High School’s FFA program finished up the project and got it ready for painting.
Students from the high school’s art program painted the book barn.

The Louisa County Farm Bureau Women’s Committee and the FFA alumni are planning to build three more learning barn bookshelves, one for each of the elementary schools.
“The barns are a way to promote agriculture and support agriculture business,” said Mary Jo Hopkins, president of the chapter’s Women’s Committee. “We wanted to supply the libraries with a fun way to educate children on agriculture.”
To pay for the project, committee members will raffle off a framed print, “Shenandoah Silos,” by Virginia artist P. Buckley Moss. Money from the raffle will pay for materials for the remaining three bookshelves and for the books.

Each bookshelf costs about $500 for materials and books.
Agriculture remains the largest industry in Virginia, according the Virginia Farm Bureau’s Web site.
The state has 47,600 farms, which cover approximately 8.6 million acres, according to Farm Bureau statistics.