Elizabeth Elder: Children’s day shows us farmers can be lush
Leaving aside the World Cup (and I intend to), the highlight of June for us has been helping at the Children’s Countryside Day at Wooler.
All the stewards are volunteers from Glendale Agricultural Society and many of us have been helping since the first event six years ago. There is a great feeling of community about the event, which is what makes it so special.
The exhibitors give their services for free, there is no charge to the schools and nobody is selling anything. However, transporting more than 1,500 children from 40 schools across Northumberland and North Tyneside means it is a bit of a bus company benefit day.
The event is partly about educating children from towns about country life. But just as importantly, it is about connecting with kids from country schools, most of whom don’t live on farms.There’s something for everyone. Some of the children from the towns have never been on farmland or seen farm animals before. Some of the children from the hills will not have seen much of the arable machinery on display before. And many people have never seen a working sheepdog obeying instructions.
Jake’s role in the event was as a livestock steward. He had been given a pen of Blackie tups and a pen of Blackie ewes and mule lambs to look after. He likes to tell each group of children a bit about the sheep and get them to chat and ask questions, and the general feedback was that the lambs were “lush”.
All the children wanted to touch the animals, so he held up a lamb for them to pat. Bearing in mind last week’s report into the E coli outbreak at Godstone Farm, Surrey, this was subject to each school’s health and safety policy, and was followed by a visit to nearby hand-washing points.
The local Healthcare Trust even put on a demonstration about the need for hygiene, bringing along special lamps that highlighted germs on people’s hands. “Now children, how do you get these germs off your hands?” they asked. “Lick them?” came the reply. Hopefully that was before the talk rather than afterwards.
As luck would have it, the rubber ring on one of the wether lambs decided to do its work right in the middle of one of Jake’s talks. A young boy spotted an item on the ground and asked if it was a mouse. Jake said it wasn’t a mouse, which prompted the question: “What is it then?” After thinking about where this conversation could lead, Jake chickened out and said he didn’t know.
I, on the other hand, was assigned to the safety of the stewards’ tent, helping with some of the morning admin. This had the double advantage of being close to the coffee and giving me the chance to have a good look around in the afternoon.
I particularly liked the beautiful black piglets owned by the Renner family. Apparently their children had wanted some pets so Johnny and Helen thought they’d get them something edible.
After seeing the livestock, the school groups moved to the auction ring, where Tony from Wooler Mart auctioned a pen of six mule hogs. The children entered into the spirit of it, bidding up to a top price of £10,000 on the day.
I reported this level of trade to the steward on the butchers’ tent, who remarked that Wooler Mart was obviously doing well and he should give it another try. The exhibits in this particular tent were a big hit, with the exception of a few vegetarian teachers who steered well clear.
On past experience, if there is going to be trouble at the event it is usually in the big marquee and it usually involves food. For some reason, people seem more prone to smash and grab things when they are free, and the children aren’t the worst offenders; it’s the parent-helpers and teachers.
Previously, we have had to guard hand-outs of strawberries as if it was UN emergency food aid. And this year I gather there was a bit of friction at the home-made lemonade stand. There were also the usual queues for Doddington ice-cream, even though it wasn’t really ice-cream weather.There were heaps of other exhibits on the day, including birds of prey (wisely situated a long way away from the gamekeepers’ tent), sheep shaving (as I heard one girl describe it), rural craftsmen, and an impressive display from Tarmac, which operates numerous local quarries.
In one exhibit, Margaret showed the kids a bucket of white feathers and asked them what sort of a creature they came from. Someone suggested a sheep, and I suppose if you have seen a sheep only in a cartoon, you might think anything white and fluffy could be wool.
This incident illustrates perfectly why the Children’s Countryside Day is so important.
At the end of the afternoon there was a cup of tea and a debrief for all the stewards, who were basking in the warm feeling of having contributed to something worthwhile. The children and exhibitors all enjoyed it, no children had been lost or injured and no animals had escaped.
The overall verdict on the day? It was “lush”.
About Elizabeth
Elizabeth and husband Jake – who have two children, Julia and Archie – farm 235ha of hill ground on the Otterburn Firing Range in Northumberland
They have 520 breeding ewes and 30 suckler cows, and went organic in 2001
Brought up on a dairy farm, Elizabeth is an accountant by training, with a background in corporate finance and business appraisal.