Making flour at the GRDC stand in the Food Farm at the Royal Easter Show
There is no denying the Sydney Royal Easter Show is a huge opportunity to show people where their food comes, meet a farmer, learn how to make tabbouleh, crush wheat, make pastry, learn how to wash your hands properly, learn that cotton grows on plants and wool grows on sheep,that tractors are huge, that girls are farmers too and you don’t have to be a farmer to be part of the industry that feed and clothes us. Believe it or not you can do all that ( and lots more) in the just one pavilion – The Food Farm which is run by the RAS Ag Development Team
Now as you can imagine SRES costs an absolute motza to run and if you are a farming industry and you would like to expose your farmers and the things they grow to the 1 million people who visit the show it can be an expensive day out for your industry in set up costs, staff time and travel and accommodation so if you are going to do it you better do it well.
This year farming industries had a new opportunity to have conversations with primary school students and teachers at the Primary School Preview Day which was held on the day before the show officially opened.
The brief was to run fun, interactive 15 minute workshop for five schools. The Art4Agriculture team frocked up and partnered with Greg Mills, Cotton Young Farming Champion Laura Bennett and all things wool industry Guru Fiona Raleigh.
We wanted the take home messages from our workshops to centre around
- Everything around me is connected to farmers and farming
- Farmers are important to me
To reinforce this we borrowed some ripper little devices from the NSW DPI that allowed us to run a quiz.
We firstly used cotton as an example of the diversity of things in our everyday lives that contain cotton 
Just to ensure the kids knew how to work their computers. We asked this question
then we got stuck into it
And there was plenty of hands on products to show the answer to all of those questions was “all of the above”
Wool Guru Fiona Raleigh then gave the students the ‘wool experience’
So what did the kids learn – as it so happened we had an Archie in hand that was painted with blackboard paint and we invited the students to share with us what they learnt
We had very sore feet at the end of the day and we were pleased when it was wine o’clock and everyone had fun and learnt a lot including the farmers
