Through feeding livestock, planting, harvesting and preparing meals, children build a lasting connection to food, farming and nature. Tim Rose, our Head of Operations reflects on why our founding principles still guide us today.
50 years of hands-on farming education
We have been farming now for 50 years, five decades of raising livestock and growing fruit and vegetables alongside our visiting children and young people. We started with a handful of acres and a walled garden on our founding farm in rural Devon and then expanded with a second small farm on the wild coastal landscape of Pembrokeshire, before securing a third and larger farm on the banks of the River Severn in Gloucestershire.
We work long days with our visiting children and young people, and everyone is out on jobs before breakfast, working through into the evenings, come rain or shine. We find time to eat well, to play and to soak up our beautiful rural environments.
Learning enriched by our partner farmers
Right from the establishment of our first farm, we placed great value on the opportunity to work in close partnership with commercial farmers next door. This has been an enduring model, with each of our current partner farmers all now in their second generation of that long relationship. As well as working on our own farms, our visiting children and young people spend time on our partner farms, seeing agriculture at the kind of scale and scope that we simply cannot deliver, as well as hearing about the challenges of farming at a commercial scale. Our partner farmers are a much-loved part of our community of have been central to the success of our charity.
Rare breeds, fresh produce and purposeful farm work
We are passionate about farming, but don’t operate on a commercial scale – our farms are there primarily to provide authentic and purposeful activities for our beneficiaries as well as putting great produce into our own kitchens and dining rooms. However, we do sell a small amount of surplus produce into our local communities and to partners.
We champion local and rare breeds where we can – large black pigs, Devon Ruby cattle and Dartmoor sheep in Devon, goats and Welsh pigs in Pembrokeshire and Gloucester Cattle and Old Spot pigs in Gloucestershire. All three farms have a busy poultry set up, incubating and hatching chicks in order to keep our laying flocks in good order and a steady stream of collected eggs into the house. We also keep equines on each farm, not to ride, but to give our beneficiaries experience of mucking out stables and getting close up with some of our larger animals in grooming sessions.
Evolving our programme, staying true to our roots
Like many farmers, we have experienced change on our farms over the years. We have diversified our beneficiary offer in order to stay relevant and to make the most of experiences which have the greatest impact. However, we have also remained true to our roots, with our weeklong immersion in authentic and purposeful farming activity being driven by the jobs that need doing rather than by worksheets or learning objectives.
We often think about what we do in terms of telling stories – the charity has a strong literary heritage. We develop our rich and engaging stories through the experiences we provide and conversations we have with our visiting children and young people. These stories really do impact on the views they are forming about farming, food and the countryside – that is both a great privilege and responsibility.
As we have developed our offer, we have made much more of the story around growing our own food – our gardens and polytunnels have developed to become busy all year round with seasonal jobs and harvesting directly for the kitchen. It is amazing what veg the children will try for the first time if they have been involved in growing, harvesting and preparation!
More recently, we have been developing our story around environmental citizenship and how farmers can be great supporters of habitats and diversity on their farms. We have some exciting regenerative agriculture projects up and running and like many others, we have made positive changes to the way that we manage our field margins, hedges, ponds and water courses.
All of our gardeners and farmers are passionate about soil and compost – we manage all of our food and green waste on site. We have created engaging learning spaces within our woodlands and planted many new trees – we have even become beekeepers, and have built hides for birdwatching sessions too.
What young people learn from a week of real farming
Our visiting children and young people leave us with their eyes wide open to the beauty and diversity of natural spaces, to the rich biodiversity that can be encouraged to thrive. They leave us with a really strong sense of where their food comes from and a better understanding of the choices they make as consumers, including how they can continue to grow food back at school or at home. And of course, they leave us with a much better understanding of the vital contribution that farmers make to feeding our nation.
Here’s to the next 50 years!
We can only grow the knowledge, confidence and curiosity of the young people who visit our farms with your support. Visit our Support Us page to find out how you can help us ensure that thousands more children can thrive on our farms for the next fifty years and beyond.
