Fun at the Farm for Local School
Children in the Fens
On Monday (14th June), we opened the gates to one of our farms to over 50 children in conjunction with Open Farm Sunday 2010 and the ‘Grow Your Open Potatoes’ project run by the Potato Council.
Local schools were invited to Hope Farm near Southery, giving the children an opportunity to meet the farmers who grow their food, care for the countryside and learn all about how their vegetables grow, creating that vital connection between the field and the supermarket.
Colleagues from both Fenmarc and Agrimarc took the children on tours of our potato trial plot and vegetable patch, looking at weird and wonderful varieties of potatoes, vegetables such as peppers and gherkins, squashes.
Understanding how vegetables grow in fields to reaching their families shopping trolleys is a big challenge today, which if understood, can really benefit children and create fantastic interest in food and farming.
The event combined the children’s learning’s from the ‘Grow Your Own Potatoes’ project they had been involved in with visits from Fenmarc, developed further with the Open Farm initiative, exploring the bigger scale of food farming, its impact on the environment and importantly creating a physical link back to the farmers in the area.
This is the first year we have taken on such an event and thought it to be a great success. Mark Taylor, Director here at Fenmarc was at the Farm to help out - ‘the children seemed really enthusiastic with lots of questions, although I have to say their favourite did seem to be Potato Pete and Katie Carrot and of course sitting in the tractor! This was a great start to an event we aim to build on year on year, in support of fantastic initiatives like open Farm Sunday and the ‘Grow your Own Potatoes’ project- by combining these two projects in our own way we hope we can really make a difference to the schools in our local area!.’
Along with planting potatoes to take home and grow themselves, the children were able to bring out their creative side and join in with a giant painting activity, encouraged to paint scenes from their time at the farm; Katie Carrot and Potato Pete were big hits for inspiration!