From being an office manager for 20 years to environmental expert the last 10, it took Jill Shankel, 55, a while to figure out what she wanted to do “when I grew up,” she said.

Allied News staff writer Felicia A. Petro talked to Shankel about her dream job with the Mercer County Conservation District (MCCD) in Coolspring Township, where she educates children about agriculture and water, as well as helping out watershed groups in the county.

FP: How do you like what you do?

JS: I love my job. It’s really fun to come in the morning. Of course there’s desk work, but there’s outdoor programming that takes place behind our office on Munnell Run Farm and it’s a really nice setting.

It’s a 163-acre working farm, what remains from the Mercer County Home and Hospital farm. Now it’s Woodland Place. The county still owns it, has leased it to Munnell Run Farm Foundation Inc. and it’s managed by the (MCCD).

Our focus is on agriculture and ecology. Our idea is you can’t separate the two. Any time you till the soil, you’re opening up to erosion. People try to farm land that isn’t farmable, like draining a wetland to farm. It’s not conducive. Farming is necessary. We have to eat. But if you use right methods on the right type of land, you’re not going to degrade the environment.

Our Agriculture Best Management Practices are on-the-ground projects to improve water quality. Munnell Run is a demo site for farmers who want to have practices for their farms.

The conservation district was established to improve the water quality of the watershed we’re in, which happens to be Munnell Run. If we improve the Munnell Run head stream, it will affect those downstream. It has managed it since 1989. To find out a nice history, our Web site is www.munnellrunfarm.org.

Also, www.pacd.org, and click under “conservation district,” is a good place to learn of conservation districts in general. It’s a strange entity. There’s one in every county in Pa. and every one does something different. In more urban counties, issues are very different – like urban sprawl – than what we’d deal with in an agriculture community.

FP: Do you believe the MCCD is being successful?

JS: Yeah, absolutely. Currently, we’re involved with a lot of projects through (state) Growing Greener grants to improve watersheds in the county. We don’t have regulatory power, but conservation districts provide education to farmers, developers, and municipalities.

FP: What do you feel is your expertise?

JS: I consider myself a non-formal educator. I don’t teach in a classroom, but I have to develop programs that meet Pennsylvania academic standards for schools and kids. Then parents also decide to bring their kids (to Munnell Run). For our summer program, we’ve had a huge increase in the number of pre-schoolers that come. Instead of 10 or 12, we now get close to 40 signed in the summer. The kids really know me as “Mill Jill.”

We teach them different aspects of farming. We want them to understand where their food comes from. Today, Grandma doesn’t even have a farm anymore. Most kids don’t have exposure to the whole food system, how this all happens. We feel it’s important because one day they will be a consumer of food choices. My job is more toward students and teachers, but overall the other staff deals with adults as much as kids. It’s an equal mix.