In celebration of National Dairy Month (June), a North East dairy company has been educating children about the journey of their food from ‘field-to-fork’ through a series of activity days on location at the farm and dairy.
On June 18,19 and 20, three groups of 30 primary school children from across the North East received an exclusive tour of The Village Farm, Morden, which is a working dairy farm.
A modern working farm
They were shown how the cows are milked using robotic milking machines, met the animals on the farm, and participated in a dairy-related activity trail.
In the afternoon, the groups then travelled to the dairy at Embleton Hall Farm to see yoghurt being made, tested and bottled the milk and how the products are packaged so they are ready to take to retailers.
The day-long educational events were organised by Paul Thompson, director of Embleton Hall Dairies near Wingate, providers of milk to local authorities across the region.
To win a farm visit schools had to enter a competition which invited pupils to dream up a design for a new milkshake.
The winners of the competition were:
- Hedworth Primary School;
- St. Bede’s Primary School;
- South Shield; and
- Ingleton Church of England Primary School.
Paul Thompson, director of Embleton Hall Dairies, said: “Knowing and trusting where your food comes from and how it is produced is extremely important to us and we thoroughly enjoyed welcoming the children to the farm and our dairy.
We wanted to give them a unique ‘hands-on’ experience of a working dairy farm and to give them a true insight into how their milk is produced.
“The children have been an absolute delight throughout and if the visits have been as rewarding for them as they have been for us, then this has been a tremendously worthwhile experience for everyone, which we look forward to repeating next year.”
