No one wants to see their child laying in a hospital bed. When this unfortunate circumstance becomes a reality, many Marengo County residents choose Children’s of Alabama in Birmingham.

To show support and care for children and families who find themselves at the country’s third-largest pediatric hospital, the Marengo County Farmers Federation donated $1,000 to Children’s of Alabama.

In 2016 alone, Children’s of Alabama logged 1,156 medical visits by pediatric patients from Marengo County. In total last year, there were 676,484 patient visits to the hospital’s clinics with 15,784 patient admissions.

The fundraising effort was part of the Alabama Farmers Federation’s Commodity Producers Conference, which took place in Birmingham Aug. 3-5. Donations were collected from county Federations across the state, from Alabama Farmers Federation and Alfa Insurance employees and during the Alabama Farm Expo Aug. 5. At the closing banquet, the Federation presented Children’s of Alabama with a check for $120,000.

Children’s of Alabama is the state’s only free-standing pediatric hospital. It includes the pediatric teaching hospital for the School of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the state’s only pediatric kidney dialysis program, one of the Southeast’s largest burn units and one of the nation’s only pediatric rheumatology programs.

(This article originally published in the Saturday, August 19, print edition of the Demopolis Times.)