Children need to learn where their food comes from
NFU Cymru staff and members have recently taken part in the Farmers for Schools training, which was held on the Royal Welsh Showground, Llanelwedd.
The training was organised by the NFU education team who are expanding the NFU’S award-winning education portfolio by launching this new programme, specifically focused on growing the understanding of British food and farming within secondary schools.
As part of the programme farmers, growers and NFU and NFU Cymru staff have been trained to speak to teenagers about the people who produce their food and the realities and career opportunities of modern farming in the UK. NFU Cymru Next Generation Group members and the NFU Student & Young Farmer Ambassador Programme members were also in attendance.
It was excellent to see how enthusiastic everyone was to learn more about how to present to schools. We have just welcomed our third intake of the NFU Cymru Next Generation Group, which was set up to encourage younger members of the farming community to have their say on the future of Welsh farming, so it was great to be able to incorporate both groups to help teach the younger generation.
The Farmers for Schools programme will build on the NFU’S work in primary schools with the hugely successful Farmvention challenge and Farming Stemterprise project, using farmer ambassadors to provide the country’s teenagers with first-hand experiences about how their food is produced and the varied career opportunities within farming.
We want to inspire teenagers across the country to think more about farming, and we asked farmers and growers to help bring to life how farmers produce their food and look after the environment.
I truly believe that children need to learn where their food comes from, and who is better to explain this than the farmers and growers producing it?
I’ve done school events in the past and have been concerned by how removed students are from the way food is produced and its role in nature.
The Farmers for Schools programme is so important in bridging this knowledge gap.
TV programmes have got people thinking and understanding more about agriculture, and now is the time to build on that and teach the next generation of workers and consumers about British food and farming.
This is an exciting programme that will give farmers the opportunity to pass on their knowledge and expertise to the next generation, as well as talking about farming’s vital role in producing food for the nation and the role it plays in caring for the environment.
For more information about Farmers for Schools and the union’s other education work, please visit the NFU Education website.
EVEN after 40 years of making silage there is still a sense of anxiety and anticipation.
Prior to the event the machinery has to be prepared, cleaning the pit and with a new roll of plastic it is all waiting for a window in the weather. This year we were lucky that the weather held for us and we were able to carry on for three days almost nonstop to get a very good crop in. We will go through the same process again a couple of times later in the year.
Whilst on the subject of grass there has been another three-word slogan bandied about, ‘No Mow May’. This has been primarily with reference to domestic lawns encouraging people to allow their lawn to grow and flower to encourage bees and other insects.
Well, this year we did the same with the lawns around our house and they now look as though they should have been incorporated into first-cut silage.
It did, however, give us an opportunity to identify the various species growing in the sward which included eight species of flowers such as ladies smock, sorrel and speedwell, six grasses, for example several fescues, bent grasses and Yorkshire fog and to my embarrassment one thistle and an oak sapling! It could easily be described as a species rich lawn. It was a nightmare to get the lawnmower through it which necessitated
Jinsy and David Robinson are organic dairy farmers from Penyrallt Farm in the Teifi Valley. It is a traditional, mixed, family farm, run by the Robinson family since 1960 and together they strive to farm in a way which has as little impact as possible on the nature around them
going over it with a strimmer first.
One welcomes funding directed at agriculture as it might improve our productivity and work load. One study into the behavioural changes in the pre-natal ewe involved six professors from three universities and a group of seventeen ewes fitted with tracking technology. They were closely monitored and the researchers came to the amazing conclusion that prior to parturition the ewe spend more time standing and shuffling about.
Nice funding if you can get it, but just ask any shepherd and they would have told you the same thing for a fraction of the cost if not, indeed, nothing . . . a case of academia siphoning funds to state the b ****** g obvious.
Whilst on the subject of research, we did our own this year prompted by the hike in diesel prices.
How much fuel does the operation of making silage use? So, for your benefit without the aid of a research grant, we use 12 litres an acre which can be broken down into mowing three litres, raking 1.2 litres, forage wagon 5.8 litres and the JCB pushing the grass into the pit two litres.
The first cut was taken off 80 acres and involved a six-mile round trip per load. With the price increase on diesel this year’s fuel bill is £500 more than last year and there is no way of reducing the fuel consumption.
This is all part of something called Aginflation and currently farmers are bearing the brunt of this. With food retailers showing increased profits, Tesco’s profits last year trebled to £2billion, a little of this needs to filter down, but with its chief executive stating that to maintain this trajectory it is ‘laser-focussed on it’s costs’ – no guessing where the pressure will be, namely producers otherwise known as farmers.