Eggs, pork, and home-grown flour were some of the ingredients used Thursday to teach students about the importance of agriculture in Manitoba.

Agriculture in the Classroom (AITC), a non-profit organization that goes into schools to teach kids about farming, held a breakfast at Northlands Parkway Collegiate in Winkler, featuring breakfast sandwiches with only Manitoba-made ingredients. Culinary students prepared over 800 eggs, sausage patties, and biscuits to feed the entire student body breakfast.

The morning also included a presentation by AITC program coordinator Stephanie Richards on the importance of agriculture. She says there is definitely a disconnect between students and farms today.

"They need to know where our food comes from, and that we do produce practically all the food we eat, it does come from our province, and when they go to the grocery store and pick up a loaf of bread there is a whole chain in behind that loaf of bread. It wasn't just produced there, it came from many different aspects of agriculture," Richards says.

Sue Clayton, associate executive director of AITC Manitoba, says the Made in Manitoba Breakfast is one of their flagship programs. She says they offer the program to over 40 Manitoba schools per year, with over 9000 students eating the locally-produced breakfast.

But the breakfast is about much more than the food. Clayton says AITC's work is particularly important because there isn't a set agriculture unit in the Manitoba curriculum.

"Kids just don't know where their food is coming from," she says, "they're more removed from the farm than they ever used to be. There are fewer and fewer people farming and more people living in urban environments, so they're just not as connected to where their food comes from. We want students to be educated consumers and critically think when they're purchasing food."

Clayton adds they are a volunteer-run organization, and welcomes anyone interested to get involved by going to the AITC website.