SHAVERTOWN, LUZERNE COUNTY (WBRE/WYOU-TV) — March is National Agriculture Month and farmers across America play a vital role in ensuring we have food on our table’s day in and day out.

The Lands at Hillside Farms is dedicated to, above all else, agricultural education. One of the ways they do that is allowing everyone to get up close and personal with the animals.

So, you drive to the store, grab yourself some milk and go on your merry way. But it isn’t all that simple — it all starts on a farm.

“For a lot of families, their kids obviously love animals, if you can get them off the phone for 10 minutes, I mean if you get me off the phone for 10 minutes right. To connect with nature a little bit, I just think it’s good for many reasons,” said Chet Mozloo, executive director.

Mozloom is the executive director at The Lands at Hillside Farms, a non-profit dairy farm in Luzerne County. Anyone can come and walk through their barns to see everything in action.

“Open up as much as we can and not hide anything and say, yeah you can come. If a cow is having a calf that day, you can come up to the barn and witness it. We’re not hiding anything,” Mozloom said.

They want to preserve their 412 acres of history. One of the best ways to do that? Open a farm.

“What are we going to do with the milk? Throw it away? So, we make ice cream and sell milk and do all of those things and offer other local products, but our big thing is really education,” Mozloom said.

To honor that promise, they just started an adopt-a-chick program.

“Families will take home a chick as ‘foster chicks’ for seven weeks and raise them in the comfort of their own home, COVID friendly, and then they will return their chicks to us after seven weeks where they will finish off their raising here at hillside and join our laying flock,” said Sierra Krohnemann director of education at the farm.

The program ranges from $125-$175 which covers the costs of two chicks, supplies, seven education packets, weekly zoom meetings and an on-call farmer 24/7.

To find out more on the educational opportunities at The Lands at Hillside Farms, visit their website.