Why does a posh agricultural college open its doors in summer to urban teenagers?

Naps Williams gets to grips with a pony at Butts Farm during a work experience day with the Young City Farmer programme. Photograph by Sam Frost.

Farmers for a fortnight

By Louise Tickle
The Guardian
7 September 2010

Excerpt:

The Royal Agricultural College (RAC) in the leafy Cotswolds isn’t where you’d expect to find urban youngsters from areas of disadvantage around the UK, but these are here for the RAC’s Young City Farmer two-week summer school .

Agricultural settings are dangerous places, Thomasin-Foster, a lecturer in farm mechanisation, explains. So, if an accident happens in the countryside, how long does the group reckon it’ll take for an ambulance to arrive?

Well-drilled by their ex-SAS first aid and health and safety instructor earlier in the week, the group know that it’s likely to be the best part of 40 minutes before they’d see any flashing blue lights: should their tractor end up wrapped round a tree this morning, complete with injured driver and/or onlookers, they’ve been taught that the remoteness of the location means that someone will need to leg it to the main road to guide the ambulance in.

Farming as an industry is losing people fast – young people are moving into towns, and put plainly, older farmers are a dying breed. If it’s to have a future in the UK, agriculture can no longer be the preserve of the double-barrelled. This is the fourth year the summer school has been run by the college as part of its efforts to interest more students from non-traditional backgrounds in a farming career. Offered completely free to successful applicants aged 16+, it gives a dozen city-based young people identified as coming from backgrounds of social, economic or educational disadvantage the chance to live the reality of what farming life is all about.

Even though by definition they won’t have easy access to countryside, applicants have to demonstrate a passion for it in some way, says Emma Thomas, the RAC’s widening participation officer – even if that’s just an enthusiasm for growing vegetables in pots in their back garden. She targets her recruitment through town- and city-based Aim Higher co-ordinators, Connexions in urban centres, city council youth services and city farms.

“We want to give them a quality of experience, not just a dip-in and dip-out,” she explains. “That’s why it’s two weeks.”

Read the complete article here.