Our Year 1/2 students are learning about seasons and changes all around us so we thought we’d TAPify their investigations and take them on a field trip to Brad and Becc Couch’s farm at Brucknell. Brad and Becc explained that theirs was a seasonal farm, meaning that their 350 cows calve and produce milk according to the grass curve. This means that the Couch’s cows produce milk when the most grass can be directly grassed by the cows with excess seasonal grass preserved in spring, as silage or hay to be feed to the herd when there is less feed available. They had almost finished drying off their cows so that the cows, farm and Couch’s themselves could all have a rest before calving starts again. Ruby King and Cecilia Sbrizzi from ProviCo, described what happens to the Couch’s milk when it leaves farm and explained that the milk is dried into powder to be used for products such as yoghurt, icecream, nutritional powders, chocolates, dried milk products and animal milk powders. Brad and the students toured the dairy hub learning about the history of the farm, farm layout, old dairy, new calf sheds, old / new equipment, and the new herringbone dairy with stall gates where some of the teachers were ‘milked’. Becc described seasonal changes including what the cows were doing, calves, water, grass, hay, silage, plantations and tracks. To reinforce their learning about changes, the students then had to identify which changes were Natural, Managed or Constructed with some very interesting conversations taking place. The field trip concluded with Becc supplying some Haigh’s Chocolates with a quick quiz on farm facts. Thanks Brad, Becc, Ruby and Cecilia, we learnt heaps! Comments are closed.
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April 2024
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