SALEM — This year’s Oregon Ag Fest had record-setting attendance, with more than 23,000 people attending the two-day event at the Oregon State Fairgrounds.

Ag Fest is an annual open house for all things agriculture at which kids — and their parents — can learn about farming and ranching and have fun at the same time.

This year, organizers brought back a learning opportunity for third- to fifth-graders as a sneak peek at the annual event.

Ag Fest executive director Michele Ruby said the event featured 264 kids from schools in the Salem, Silverton and Woodburn areas. The students wrote essays on agriculture, and the winners’ classes were invited to “What We’re Made of Day.”

Focusing on kids interacting with agriculture, the event helped them celebrate their growing ag education.

The Ag Fest board of directors chose the winners of the essay contest. Board chair Leah Rue said the day’s events consisted of the 12 classes splitting up to go through layout in the cavernous building to visit sheep, goats, cattle and other livestock as well as a milking parlor and farm equipment.

“We have a soils station, a tree-talk station — even a ‘smell test’ station, where kids are blindfolded to identify by smell the different commodities of Oregon like cheese and mint,” Rue said.

Running from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Thursday in the Livestock Building at the fairgrounds, the day was special for the classmates and winning students from 12 schools. They submitted essays on an agricultural commodity of their choosing, Ruby said.

The essay contest was “designed to get students talking about the products that are grown locally, and learn about the unique food, fiber and flora grown in their area,” she said.

Students from the schools chose nursery, sheep, cherries, blueberries, eggs, Christmas trees and honey for their essays.

Finley Schaecher, 11, a fifth-grader at Victor Point School near Silverton, wrote her winning essay on onions.

“I talked to (Salem-area farmer) Ryan Bennett about onion farming and asked what was his favorite part of the process of growing onions,” Schaecher said, “and he said the harvest.”

The onion harvest theme moved Schaecher to mention that “The 18-Pounder” referred to the largest onion ever grown — though not on Bennett’s land. Her essay won and afforded her entire class of 26 to be bused to the event along with the other winning classes.

“We’re always looking for different ways to help people better understand the importance of agriculture,” Ruby said. “It felt like a natural extension to bring a classroom component into the fold to add to the two-day weekend of Ag Fest activities.”

“We had to develop it in a way that also engages educators,” she said. “Oregon is awesome in the things that it produces and we want to make kids understand that milk doesn’t come from a grocery store and cereal isn’t just from a box, but it starts on a farm somewhere.

“And that somewhere, when you live in Oregon, might just be your back yard,” she said.