St Paul's Agriculture
The start of Term 2 has been a busy time for the Agriculture Team as they have been preparing their cattle for the local round of shows. Preparation began in the school holidays where the students and staff spent two successive Thursdays preparing their cattle for the Wauchope, Kempsey and Macksville shows.
For many of our students this was their first foray into showing cattle, so with the stakes so high (no pun intended), the students set about to ensure that their animals were thoroughly cleaned and clipped to perfection.
This year we made the decision to transfer our cattle to the showgrounds the evening prior to showing, this made it easier for the students to have the animal ready by 8am each morning.
We experienced some great success over the three shows with many of our students placing in the various Paraders heats. Considering that many of them had never participated in these activities before, it was encouraging to see that they were fairly close to the mark.
I would like to take the time to thank Ms Lisa Frewen and Mr Ash Gardiner for helping train our students each Thursday as well as helping to organise various aspects for the team, to ensure that we look the part and have not only the correct equipment and techniques but also the quality of cattle required to keep up with our competitors.
We are also grateful to have the support of a great number of parents and who help out in various ways. From cooking BBQ’s, carting equipment, tending to the cattle. All of this ensures that we have the resources required to achieve.
Showing cattle is a competitive pursuit and some schools spend large sums of money to secure high quality animals for the major shows such as the Sydney Show, Wingham and Upper Hunter Beef Bonanza. Six of our steers have been purchased either through our local saleyards or privately from producers in our region. This has been done largely by our farm assistant, Ash Gardiner, who regularly cases out the local Thursday cattle shows and uses his contacts to source private sale cattle.
We have also shown six steers this year that we have bred on our College farm. These animals are extremely quiet and used to being handled by the students. We are hoping to conduct a paddock to plate program this year as well, where some of our cattle will be processed and sold to our own customers.
We have been doing this for some time now with our own beef, pork, chicken, eggs, honey and vegetables. To date this year we have sold twenty fully processed pigs and twenty pasture raised chickens direct from our butcher to our own staff and parent network.
It is the intention to have a number of productive enterprises overlaid on the one area of land that compliment each other. Our pig and poultry enterprises compliment our grazing by renovating areas of land and dispersing their nutrient rich waste. This aids in the production of high quality pasture. Our cattle yards are under a shed, that is regularly filled with wood chips donated by Langhams Tree Service. This is cleaned out twice per year and composted with other organic waste such as coffee grounds from the Heights General Store and brewery waste from our local micro brewer - Bucket Brewery. We also use chicken litter and pig manure in the compost. The compost is spread on the paddocks and gardens after around 12 months of being rotated and aerated with our front end loader.
Lots of our products are consumed close to the farm, with hundreds of eggs and many kilograms of various types of meat being purchased by our staff, canteen and hospitality/food tech kitchens. By doing this we are aiming to get a better price for our products which is more sustainable and also reducing the distance that our products travel to the end user. This concept is referred to as food miles.
The end result is also to reduce the amount of chemical inputs we are using across the farm. The less we use, the cheaper the production costs become. The most important benefit is that our Agriculture and Primary Industries students are able to learn about a multitude of different management practices as well as practice a number of key skills, hopefully enough to help them secure a job in the industry.
If you would like to go on a list to buy some of our products in the future, please get in touch with me via email.
Mr Graham Bramley - Leader of Vocational Education & Training
- Agriculture and Primary Industries teacher