Mike Madison's guests can't contain their curiosity about farm life.

How many peanuts are there under the ground?

About 90, answers Madison.

Are alpacas good eaters?

"Well, I don't really know about alpacas," he confesses.

Can you make alcohol out of olives?

Olives don't have enough sugar, he explains.

In addition to the Q&A session, Madison's guests crushed wheat in their small hands and let the wind carry away everything but the grain. They ate apricots straight from the tree. They crowded around a shelf in the chicken coop that held one egg and shifted so everyone could see it.

Ranging in age from 9 to 13, most of Madison's 28 guests had eaten eggs, but they had come from cartons in refrigerators. Many had sampled apricots, far removed from leaves and trees. All had tasted wheat in baked goods, long separated from the chaff.

In its inaugural year, the Kids, Farms & Food camp at the University of California, Davis, drew interest not only from parents but also children curious about where their food originates. The camp will host a total of 70 children this summer.

"A lot of them, even living in a place like Davis, are not too knowledgeable about agriculture," said Madison, whose family has farmed 43 acres of land on Putah Creek since 1986.

The inspiration for the camp came from Kira O'Donnell, who works at UC Davis' Good Life Garden.

"I'm a mother," she said, "and I'm in an era of video games and fast food."

O'Donnell designed a camp to model what she wishes she had when she was a kid: cooking plus gardening plus farming. With a groundswell of interest in sustainability and local eating, it wasn't difficult to sell the idea at UC Davis. The camp sessions end this week but were so popular that Davis will likely bring them back next summer.

Known as the Yolo Press, the Madisons' Winters farm is one of the first stops in the weeklong camp.

The day before visiting the farm, 10-year-old Juliet Heller had played chef, creating a pizza that featured half ranch dressing, half red sauce. She remembers it as her favorite part of Monday. Then came Tuesday.

It was sure difficult to choose a favorite for that day. She thought it was tasting the olive oil that came from the trees she saw, until she had a few more seconds to think.

"No, it was feeding the chickens," she decided. "No, it was splitting the apricots for drying."

And she's going to tell her parents they should try it. Which is valuable, said Charlotte Biltekoff, an American studies and food sciences expert at UC Davis.

Farm industrialization has freed people worldwide to have more productive lives, Biltekoff said, but there's a danger that many people, especially in the United States, are too detached from food production.

"Knowing that the apple came from the tree isn't so much about the apple," she said, "but about the child having an awareness of food choices and the environment and the social implications of food."

Some of the UC Davis campers have parents interested in agriculture. Paula Kingsbury-Evans, 9, said her family has two "humungous" compost piles in the backyard. But at school, only the much older classrooms have little gardens, she said. She's had little opportunity to learn cooking and agriculture, she said.

"When the kids make the connection that they can create their own pizza or pie or jam, there's this light that comes on," said O'Donnell, who directs the food camp from the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Sciences at UC Davis.

" 'Transformative' is a good word for it."

Katie Sturgeon, 12, finished Kids, Farms & Food the first week it was offered. She went with her mom to the grocery store a few days ago, and to her newly trained eye, the apples didn't look that great.

"They weren't the right size. They didn't look healthy," she said. So she told her mom to go to a different store. "We bought organic apples somewhere else."

Katie and her mother also planned to make zucchini bread that night.

"I didn't expect that just five days of camp could do that to me," she said. "It's not just whatever's in the cupboard anymore."

Call The Bee's Sarah Frier, (916) 321-1119.