East meets West
Mid Lachlan Landcare offers Regenerative Agricultural Education Tours to urban students of all ages connecting people to sustainable food and fiber production and strengthening links between city and country.
Reaching Out - LLCI005-004
The issue
City students regularily have little understanding of where their food or fiber comes from and undertake school excursions to learn more. They are often confused about issues surrounding poor land management and detrimental farming practices causing excessive salinity and turbidity into the Murray Darling Basin.
The solution
Mid Lachlan Landcare (MLL), encompassing Cowra, Canowindra, Cargo and Gooloogong, has developed a series of school tours to cater for senior high school syllabuses in Geography, Science, Food Technology and Hospitality. Each year over 200 students from the EAST (mostly Canberra and Sydney and surrounding coastal towns) participate in these tours to the WEST.
MLL takes students to Woodstock Cemetery where they look at the rich dark soil, its biodiversity, water holding capacity and trees (at different age groups in the landscape). They then study the property “Westville” and learn how this mixed farm was once plagued by salinity, overgrazing and erosion. The students observe how this family farm has applied principles of pre-colonial land management (such as reintroducing water loving native tree-lanes and, in some paddocks, 100% perennial native ground cover) as well as rotational grazing and direct drilling, to lower the water table and transform it back to a highly productive farm.
The following businesses regularily host the student tours and give up their time to speak with the students. Woodstock Paddock Eggs, Oatleigh Mixed Grazing Farm, Rayz Organic Grazing, Rivers Road Organic Farms, Rosnay Organic, Central Tablelands Livestock Exchange CTLX, Muzzy’s Quality Meats, La Barre Olives, Mulyan Vegetable Farm and Adloyalty.
The impact
On some occasions, after visiting the local businesses, students design their own paddock to plate menu. For dinner they cook up a magnificent meal selecting their own cuts of local lamb, their own samples of olive oil and their own freshly picked asparagus, all collected on their MLL farm tours.
"Before this experience our students had no appreciation for how complex and heartfelt food production is,” said a Brigidine teacher from Randwick in Sydney. “We are so pleased we are able to run these annual excursions and make the girls more open minded and aware of something this important.”
Key facts
- 40 Brigidine student visit the Central Tablelands
- Cook their own Paddock to Plate
- Visit over 10 local Businesses