ELEMENTARY GEOGRAPHY Part Six: Farm animals Mooooooo! In the last section we said that plants a farmer grows are called crops. Now let's talk about the animals produced by Tennessee's farms. They are known as livestock. As you drive from one end of the state to the other you'll see a lot of cows, which are also known as cattle. Tennessee's farms have a lot of cows; in fact the main livestock item in the state (by dollar amount) is cattle. These beef cattle are raised to provide meat products for people to eat. Cattle, as I'm sure you know by now, are sold and eaten as steak and hamburgers. There are also some parts of Tennessee where female dairy cows are milked at least twice every day, with that milk processed and sold for people to drink. But there aren't nearly as many dairy farms in Tennessee as there used to be. Cluck! Cluck! Chickens are a lot smaller than cows. Within the world of farming, chickens come in two types: Broilers, a chicken raised for meat, and a layer, which is raised to produce eggs. By the way, chickens don't have fingers. Chicken "fingers" are parts of chicken breast cut up into small pieces and fried. And there is no such thing as buffalo wings! When a restaurant sells what it calls buffalo wings, it is selling chicken wings with hot sauce on them. Oink! Oink! Know what these are? They're pigs, or, as farmers usually call them, hogs. When pigs make it to your kitchen they are usually known as bacon, ham, sausage and pork chops. Although you'll find pig farms all over Tennessee, the top three counties in Tennessee for hog production are Henry, Weakley and Gibson counties -- all in the western part of the state. Baaaaaaah! PHOTO: TN Department of Agriculture Here are a couple more interesting things about livestock in Tennessee: * There are many sheep and lamb farmers in Tennessee. Although people do eat sheep and lamb, the main reason they are farmed is because sheep fur (known as wool) makes great winter clothes. * Tennessee is one of the top states in the nation for raising horses (only behind Texas) * Tennessee ranks second in the nation in goat farming. Most goats are raised for meat, but some are raised for milk. East Tennessee, where the land is very hilly and hard for many kinds of farming, has proven to be a good place to raise goats. For more information:     * The Tennessee Department of Agriculture has a lot of information for students on its web page. Click here to be taken to it. * The Tennessee Farm Bureau has a program called "Ag in the Classroom" that provides workshops and lesson plans that help teachers use agriculture to learn other subjects like math, science and social studies. Click here to learn more about it. * And of course there is the Tennessee 4-H, which has a myriad of programs and activities in and out of the classroom that teach kids about agriculture. Here is their website. Now we're gonna get out the shovel and talk about things that people find in the ground in Tennessee. Click here.