“Our main goal is to educate people on how we manage our forests,” Darrel Showers of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and Pennsylvania Hardwoods Development Council said.

Showers met with groups of third graders Thursday inside the Woodmobile at the Warren County Fairgrounds.

He said the program works to plant seeds about forestry not being a harmful industry.

“We want to dispel the myth that cutting trees is bad for the earth,” Showers said. “We’re roughly cutting down one tree for every three that are growing.”

Allegheny National Forest Public Affairs Officer Christopher Leeser instructs Warren Area Elementary Center third graders (from left) Nick Tyler, Taylor Phillips, Antonella Clemente, Evelyn Phillips, and Ben Huff, in the placement of heartwood and rings in their paper-plate cross sections during the Woodmobile event Thursday at Warren County Fairgrounds.

Students in Warren County are surrounded by forests. They are more familiar with forest management than students in other parts of the state and generally more comfortable with the Woodmobile messages, he said.

Thursday’s Woodmobile event was cut short by an emerging situation in the county, but about 150 students still moved around to some of the stations headed up by personnel from Chapman State Park, the Allegheny National Forest, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, Drake Well, and others.