LEAF Open Farm School Days run alongside the annual LEAF Open Farm Sunday and a number of farmers do both! Thanks to the support from our sponsors, it is free of charge for farmers to participate in LEAF Open Farm School Days and LEAF Open Farm Sunday.
LEAF Education has been helping to boost the numbers of schools involved in the Open Farm School Days initiative in 2018. Our Regional Consultants have been recruiting or supporting farmers throughout June.
For the first time this year we received additional funding from the Henry Sale Foundation for Open Farm School Day events in the Bristol and Leicester areas.
Fifty one pupils from Wansdyke School in Whitchurch, Bristol, spent a day at Fosse Farm. Leaf Demonstration Farmer Jeremy Padfield showed pupils how many loaves of bread and bottles of beer could be made from his wheat and barley fields and described the many other uses for these and other crops. Pupils learned about crop rotations and how Jeremy looks after the farm environment before returning to the farmyard to meet some of the livestock in the barn.
Debbie Hicks, South West Consultant Educational Consultant for LEAF, helped pupils to extend their understanding of curriculum topics they were covering in school, using the farm walk as a context for learning.
Pupils explored classification (using buttercups in the hay meadow), adaptations (looking at thistles, nettles and dog roses in the hedgerows), and variation (counting the number of grains in a head of wheat and forming human histograms from their results).
The Henry Sale Foundation trustee Archie Sale and his mother provided welcome additional help and enthusiasm throughout the day.