Farm Visits Day

Listening to Neil Gow and Peter Chamberlin

Last week we went to three farms in one day.  One was a sheep farm, one was a dairy farm and one was a deer farm.  The first farm we visited was a sheep and crop farm.  The farm owner’s name was Peter Chamberlin.  Peter talked about how he manages his farm which is mostly very dry and stony land.  He also talked about earthquake damage on his farm and that the epicenter( the place where an earthquake starts) of the February 2011 earthquake which was a 6.2 on the Richter scale was at his next door neighbors.  Besides sheep Peter also grew peas, barley(like my family does), wheat and grass seed.  He had a really bad windstorm in the spring this year (our fall in Delaware) that knocked down a lot of big, old trees around the perimeter of the fields that the animals used for shelter.

The second person we visited was a retired farmer named Pat Morrison who talked about irrigation and how important water is to farmers.  He and his wife Margaret had tea and coffee and juice for all of us and even had made savouries for our whole group.  His son now runs their farm as a dairy which is a change since the last time we visited in 2011.  Pat and Margaret's gardens and lawn were beautiful.  We all loved laying on his lawn.

 

 

Having class on the lawn with Mr. Morrison

Our group



Colin Guild explaining velvet to us

The students really enjoyed their visit with Colin

The last farm we went to was named Quartz Hill.  The owners name was Colin Guild.  His farm was 7,000 acres.  He had sheep and cattle but was especially proud of his deer.  Colin grew the deer to be able to sell females deer(called hinds) to other farms, deer meat (venison) for people to eat and also harvested velvet.  He raised a kind of deer called red deer which are much bigger than the deer we have in Delaware.  Velvet is deer antler that grows from the deer’s head before it hardens and turns to bone.   Some people in the world take deer velvet pills like you would take your vitamins every day.  We drove our bus out onto Colin’s farm to see his pastures with the deer in it.  Then we went into the deer shed where he harvests velvet.  We were tired at the end of the day when we went back to Lincoln.

My sister and I checking out the velvet.  It was heavy!



Deer out in the pasture on Colin's farm. 
They were scared of our bus.

Some of Colin's working dogs