CSM EDITORIAL

Our friends at The Country Trust Charity released a press release this week regarding beaming footage of lambing into the classrooms of city children. We here at Country Squire Magazine are very happy to cover this wonderful initiative. Here it is below:

Bringing the wonders of lambing into the classroom

Educational charity The Country Trust install a “LambCam” on a working farm in Kent to bring the wonders of the lambing shed to city children.

Every year dynamic education charity The Country Trust brings the working countryside alive for nearly 25,000 disadvantaged primary school children through day visits to real working farms. Now, thanks to support from Fidelity Weston, one of the charity’s host farmers, a video camera has been installed in the lambing shed on Romshed Farm near Sevenoaks in Kent to capture fantastic footage of some of the farm’s 150 pregnant sheep as they deliver their lambs.

The webcam means that for the first time the charity can bring the reality of farm and country life into the classrooms of thousands of schools, providing compelling real-time viewing for children and a valuable resource for teachers to support the Science curriculum.  Recorded footage already available on The Country Trust website includes the first lamb born on the farm this season and some fun footage of a litter of lively one week old piglets and their mum running around their sty and outdoor pen.

Jill Attenborough, Chief Executive of The Country Trust said “This is a first for the charity and something we are immensely excited about. We are acutely aware that there are many thousands of children who aren’t yet able to take part in our farm visit programme. The webcam opens up so many wonderful possibilities for us to bring the farm into urban homes and classrooms. Springtime on the farm is full of new life and as well as lambing we plan to show swallows nesting, piglets in their sty and calves being born too. Our mission is to bring the countryside alive for those children who are least likely to be able to access it – we think our LambCam is going to be a great step forward! ”

Farmer Fidelity Weston agrees, “When we were first approached by The Country Trust to be involved in this terrific project, we jumped at the chance as we had already been thinking about how to deepen our engagement  with our existing schools and to bring farming life to a greater number of schools.  Of the 20 farm visits we host each year, we currently hold six for The Country Trust and would like to do more but the constraints of running a busy working farm means it is not possible. With the webcam schools that already have a visit can continue to see what is going on at the farm when they are back at school and we can also engage with more schools.  Over time we would like to install more cameras to show all of the wonderful things that happen on the farm and in doing so, I hope we are encouraging children to develop an understanding of farming and where their food comes from.”

The Country Trust webcam at Romshed Farm can be viewed at www.countrytrust.org.uk/webcam

To find out more about The Country Trust, become a host farmer or a regular supporter of the charity, go to www.countrytrust.org.uk