OC Fair & Event Center’s Centennial Farm Celebrates 25 Years With Special Guests & Animals In Party Hat
Costa Mesa, Calif. (November 21, 2014) – The Centennial Farm at the OC Fair & Event Center celebrated its 25th anniversary with a private ceremony featuring special guests, award ceremony and of course cute animals.
Some of the special guests and speakers included former California Secretary of Agriculture A.G. Kawamura, Centennial Farm Foundation Board of Directors Vice President Lon Records, City of Costa Mesa CEO Tom Hatch, and OC Fair & Event Center staff and board members. Staff member Jim Bailey was also recognized for his 55 years of service to the OC Fair & Event Center, during which he helped create, build and grow the Farm.
Centennial Farm is a three-acre working farm created to educate youth about agriculture and its importance to daily life. Children and adults can view fruit and vegetable gardens and livestock like pigs, chickens, peacocks, llamas, cattle, and goats.
Through the Farm’s free school tours, The Ranch After-school program and other agricultural programs, the Farm has benefitted more than one million schoolchildren since its inception.
A young chicken gets into the party spirit for the Centennial Farm’s 25th Anniversary Celebration.
Click on the image for more Farm photos on Flickr.
The Farm is also home to the Millennium Barn, a 4,680-square-foot working barn built in 2000 with a milking parlor, horse stalls, tack room, hay loft and more. Live milking demonstrations are also offered in the Barn during the Farm’s year-round tours program, the summer OC Fair and springtime Imaginology.
The Farm’s Jr. Farmers’ program features free guided tours for pre-registered school groups, grades kindergarten through third, and the Discovery Days program provides unguided tour times for pre-registered groups of any grade level.
In addition to tours and public hours, the Farm also offers The Ranch After-school program, a free hands-on program for select local children in grades 4-6. Participants are immersed in agriculture with lessons and activities not available in a traditional academic course.
The Farm is funded by the OC Fair & Event Center and assisted by the Centennial Farm Foundation, which was founded in 1991 to raise support for educational programs offered at the Farm and solicits, accumulates and disburses funds for the Farm and its agriculture-focused educational programs.
For more information about the Centennial Farm and its programs, visit ocfair.com/centennialfarm.
The OC Fair & Event Center is located off the 405 and 55 freeways at 88 Fair Drive in Costa Mesa. For more information, please visit ocfair.com, become a fan on Facebook.com/OCFair, follow us at twitter.com/ocfair or call (714) 708-1500.