The distance between a child’s encounter with corn — the ear on the dinner table, the canned kernel, the bag of frozen niblets — and the child’s understanding of where corn actually comes from and how it arrives at that table is wider than most parents realize until they are standing in a field with their four-year-old and the child asks a question they cannot answer. Terhune Orchards, the Princeton-area farm that Pam and Gary Mount have operated for decades in the West Windsor Township community where 825 Cold Soil Road marks one of the most established and most beloved farm destinations in Mercer County, built its Read and Pick program specifically to close that gap — and the corn-themed session of that program is among the most educationally rich single agricultural experiences available to preschool and early elementary-age children anywhere in central New Jersey.
The Read and Pick program, which Tannwen Mount — the Mounts’ daughter and a key figure in the farm’s educational programming — developed to address a specific need she had observed in the families who visited Terhune, was designed from the outset around a recognition that the existing orchard tour model served school-age children reasonably well but left a gap for younger children whose developmental needs and attention spans called for a different kind of educational architecture. The format she created combines story time with a hands-on farm activity — picking, planting, or crafting, depending on the seasonal theme — in a structured hourlong program that is neither a passive presentation nor an unstructured farm visit but something between: a facilitated encounter with the farm’s actual crops that uses narrative to frame what children are seeing and doing, and physical engagement with the plant or produce itself to make the learning concrete rather than abstract.
The corn session is the summer iteration of the Read and Pick calendar, and it represents the kind of thematic alignment between program content and farm reality that makes the program distinctively valuable compared to a classroom-based agricultural lesson or a generic farm tour. Corn is one of the most widely consumed and most poorly understood foods in the American diet, and the gap between what most young children know about it — that it is yellow, that it exists in grocery stores, that it is sweet when eaten fresh in summer — and what the plant actually is, how it grows, what it requires from the soil and the sun and the water over the months of its growth, and what the farm’s role in producing it actually entails, is a gap that the Read and Pick corn session bridges through direct, multisensory engagement rather than through explanation alone.
The program begins with story time, in which a carefully selected book introduces the young participants to corn’s world through narrative — the specific combination of vocabulary, illustration, and sequential storytelling that is the most developmentally appropriate way to introduce complex concepts to children in the preschool and early-elementary age range. Agricultural literacy research has consistently found that children who encounter food production first through stories, before they encounter it through instruction or observation, build more durable and more transferable understanding of where food comes from, because the narrative framework gives them a structure in which to organize the observational information they subsequently encounter. Terhune’s program reflects exactly that pedagogical logic: the story comes first, and the field comes after.
The picking component of the corn session brings the story’s content into physical reality in a way that no classroom can replicate. Walking through the rows of corn at Terhune, touching the husks, examining the silk, understanding the relationship between the visible outer wrapping and the ear of corn inside, and harvesting an ear with their own hands gives children a physical memory of corn’s origin that persists in ways that visual or verbal learning does not. Agricultural education research at the elementary level has documented repeatedly that hands-on harvest experiences produce the most lasting changes in children’s food attitudes and food knowledge — that children who have picked a vegetable or fruit are substantially more likely to try and enjoy it in a food context, and substantially more likely to retain accurate knowledge about how it grows, than children who have only heard about it or seen photographs.
Terhune Orchards occupies a specific and important role in New Jersey’s farm community that extends well beyond its educational programming. Gary Mount’s recognition as Apple Grower of the Year in 2005 reflects the sustained agricultural quality that has defined the farm’s productive identity for decades, and the operation’s transition into active educational programming represents the evolution that the most successful New Jersey farm destinations have pursued: finding ways to connect the next generation of consumers to the agricultural practices and the land that produce their food, not through advocacy or guilt but through direct, joyful, developmental engagement. The Read and Pick program is the primary vehicle for that connection at the youngest age range — the children for whom a Saturday morning at Terhune’s corn session may be the first time they have ever held a corn ear still attached to its stalk, or understood that the sweet summer corn on their dinner table last August came from a field exactly like the one they are standing in.
The program is designed for children preschool through age 8 and should be attended with an accompanying parent or caregiver, making it a family outing rather than a drop-off educational program — a design choice that reflects an understanding of how early agricultural education actually works. Children this age do not learn the most important lessons from the program in isolation from their family; they learn them in the context of a shared adult-child experience that generates the kind of dinner-table conversations about where food comes from, and why the farm matters, and who grew what they are eating, that extend the program’s impact well beyond the hour it occupies. Registration for Read and Pick sessions is handled through Terhune Orchards‘ ticketing platform, accessible through the farm’s website at terhuneorchards.com, where the current season’s program schedule and available dates are maintained. Terhune Orchards is located at 825 Cold Soil Road in Princeton, New Jersey.
