This year’s ‘Ag Day’ program for Danville Area Community College is going to be a lot different than past years. Because of work being done with the installation of new air-conditioning in the Mary Miller Gymnasium, ‘Ag Day’ events will occur off the campus.
At 3:00 p.m. Sunday, March 8th, the public is invited to view the movie ‘Silo’ free of charge at the Fischer Theatre. The movie is intended to raise awareness about safety equipment that can be used to rescue people trapped in grain bins.
Tom Fricke, Public Information Spokesman for the Vermilion County Farm Bureau, says grain inside the bins can be dangerous…
{‘’It can crust over. It can stick together and it doesn’t flow out the bin right,’’ said Fricke. ‘’And so you can actually be getting into a bin — look in, and think you’ve got a solid layer of corn to be walking across and it’s been hollowed out underneath. And you don’t know that until you’re out in the middle of it, and it all caves in on you.’’}
Following the movie Sunday Fricke says a discussion will occur focusing on its message. There will also be some agriculture related displays at the Fischer Theatre starting at 2:00 p.m. Sunday, according to Brandy Marron, an Ag instructor at Danville Area Community College…
{‘’We just put together a new PAS Chapter, which is a post-secondary Ag group. And so we’re going to have a table out with all of the new things that are happening in the Ag Program at DACC,’’ said Marron. ‘’We’ll have our drones out. … My students will be there. They are also going to do a really small-scale demo of someone getting entrapped in a grain bin and how hard it is to actually pull someone out with a little action figure,’’ added Marron.}
And Marron added there’s been lots of changes in agriculture….
{‘’Ag’s changed so rapidly with new technology and developments in precision agriculture. So I’ve worked to integrate that technology into more classes – develop new courses, purchase some equipment – so the students can get hands-on experience with some of the new technologies in Ag,’’ said Marron on WDAN Radio’s ‘Newsmakers’ program.}
Although ‘Ag Day’ has been a popular event at DACC, Fricke says they have noticed crowds ‘’have not been what they used to be.’’
