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Photo by Bob Pennell Katie McMahon, 3, rests her head on a lamb during Thursday's "Touch and See" event on the Seven Oaks Farm near Central Point. Toddlers get in touch with farm life By MARK FREEMAN CENTRAL POINT -- The pony stood barely four feet tall, and it did little more than shuffle in a circle as it was led around the corral. But to Jerry Winchester, his first-ever moments atop that little horse Thursday became more magical than a 4-year-old's imagination could fathom. "I felt like I was on top of the world," Winchester said. Even peanut butter cookies and a bus ride back to preschool couldn't distract Jerry from his first agrarian experience Thursday. Jerry was one of more than 5,000 Jackson County kids invited to a special "touch and see" day at a working rural Central Point farm. The program, in its 23rd year, entails opening the 150-acre Seven Oaks Farm off Highway 99 to preschool and elementary school-aged children, who are helped with their experience of farm life by teenagers in Crater High School's Future Farmers of America program. Kids petted baby chicks, hugged lambs, snorted at pigs, scratched a donkey, rode atop an engine-revving John Deere tractor and rode ponies around a corral. The focus is on "ag literacy," or exposing kids to the realities that food comes from farms, not grocery stores. "This is big stuff now," said John Dimmick, an ag-science instructor and FFA adviser at Crater High School. "A lot of these kids really don't have a clue," he said. "A lot of parents and teachers don't have a clue, either." But those who visited Don Bradshaw's Seven Oaks Farm on Thursday found a lot of clues to the ag life. Katie McMahon, 3, of Medford, learned that lambs' wool is soft when left on the lamb, that the lamb is somehow tied into food production -- and that even baby lambs could stand to wear a diaper occasionally. "After I hugged it, it pooped," McMahon said. "We covered it up so no one would know." The program ran Tuesday through Thursday, and drew more than 5,000 children from schools and preschools from Talent to Sams Valley. And everyone learned something new. Thursday morning, Sabrina Singh had no real concept of farms, said Karla Singh, Sabrina's mother. "On the way over, she said, `Mom, I didn't know they had farms in Oregon,"' Karla Singh said. By 11 a.m., 5-year-old Sabrina had straddled a horse, petted a baby chick, sat atop a tractor and gotten her finger bitten by Homer the donkey. Sabrina might not yet know that the chicken on her dinner table was once a chick. But she did get to touch one. "It feels soft and squishy," Sabrina said, "like bread." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA