Chuck, Melissa and 2-year-old Sawyer Wingate all went down to the farm this weekend -— as many families did -— to help celebrate the sixth annual Great Valley Exposition at Lowrey Farms.

Walking into a shop on the property, Wingate held onto young Sawyer as the family walked around, seeking out the rusted, antique equipment from a bygone era of farming.

“He’s taking it all in,” Wingate said. And he too, like a kid in a candy store, found himself enthralled by all the equipment lying around the place. “It’s pretty neat. But I’ve always liked this kind of stuff.”

But the exposition wasn’t so much designed for Wingate as it was for Sawyer and the older children who enjoyed riding on a tractor-pulled train around the Lowrey Farms store on Ga. 140, according to owner John Lowrey.

“We’re just trying to educate younger generations to just how farm life was years ago,” Lowrey said. “How you had to do things to get food to the table.”

The event continues today at the farm, 2416 Turkey Mountain Road.

Farming throughout the past generations has changed drastically from horse drawn plows to satellite-driven tractors where the driver doesn’t even need to have hands on the controls, said Lowrey.

“A lot of kids probably don’t realize that they can go out to a farm and buy food that was grown in the county that they live in,” he said.

The exposition wasn’t all about the kids, however. The antique tractors and live music Saturday was more for the adults to enjoy, despite some rainy weather. The biggest addition to this year’s event was the Floyd County Farm Bureau Women’s Committee hamburger cookoff, which used the farm’s all natural beef. Lowrey said Candice Mickler won the inaugural contest, taking home $50.

Though families like the Wingates get to go home at the end of the day, the farming life for the Lowreys continues on. And if anyone took anything away from the event, he hoped it would be that there’s local produce being grown in Floyd County, and the farmers could use the support.

“That’s one of the big things we like to teach,” he said. “There are farms here. And a lot of people don’t even realize that.”