Student Projects
The farm is a classroom for learning it enables the learners to gain a wide variety of experience by having facilities to work with. In 2008 students widened their experience through a range of small projects which included rearing broiler chickens, a pig rearing enterprise, selling the pork to staff and families and the surplus to Ensors in Gloucestershire.
For 2009/10 new projects will include Turkey rearing for the Christmas market, Quail, Duck, Geese, Broilers and Worms (yes worms!). More pig rearing is planned, and we will try other business ideas that students are able to justify!
These projects are undertaken by 3rd year National Diploma in Agriculture students to give them skills in working in teams, budget responsibility, leadership and negotiation, customer care and many other aspects of management. They will work with industry, feed companies, slaughterhouses, marketing and advertising and suppliers of stock.
In addition to these projects the students will investigate various aspects of the college farm and why things happen the way they do, for example on the dairy herd they will look into fertility, mastitis, lameness; with the sheep they will look after a flock hands on and record results and problems associated with that flock; and on the beef unit they may show the animals, design a breeding programme for a group of animals, look into carcasses, investigating killing out percentages and the meat to bone ratios of various purebreds or crosses. Students monitor all aspects of these enterprises, looking at records and concluding with a way forward or recommendation and giving presentations on these subjects. First year students do practical routine duties at 4 week intervals individually on each unit of the farm.
The dairy student will be involved with milking and all aspects related to that routine, some tractor driving with scraping out the feed passages,and once they have a loadall certificate will be allowed to work with feeding and bedding.
The sheep student will be feeding and checking the sheep in the early morning and be involved in handling the sheep or fencing in the afternoon.
The student attending the beef duties could be feeding calves in the morning or feeding housed animals at Home Farm and in the afternoon handling animals – weighing, injecting, fencing, disbudding or any other tasks associated on the units.
A new student post for this year will be involved in the development of a unit for pigs.
Practical sessions with lecturers and farm staff range from tasks on tractors, manure hauling and field operations, to all livestock tasks where students get hands on as a group with detailed explanations on the task in hand, why they have to be done, consequences if they are not and the need for accuracy when doing the task. We aim to impress on students the importance of accurate record keeping across the whole of the business, as well as instilling a tidy, thorough way of working in our industry.
