What if, as well as helping fill the nation’s larders and looking after its countryside, farming was the key to solving many of our social problems?
Any farmer should know that neither crops nor livestock will thrive without nurturing.
If you applied this principle to some of society’s most challenging ‘casualties’ such as those excluded from mainstream education, you could save pots of public money and ensure much happier endings to potentially tragic stories.
This is already happening via a countrywide network of ‘care’ farms, one of which, in Dorset, has been recognised with two national awards.
Julie Plumley’s Rylands Farm, near Sherborne, is the winner of this year’s Bayer Cropscience/FACE (Farming and Countryside Education initiative) award. The farm also won the ‘countryside careers’ award for activity including offering work experience, supporting vocational qualifications for young people, and promoting the potential of working in the countryside.
Rylands Farm’s Country Club also offers therapeutic horticultural and animal-based activity for adults and older people, including retired farmers and farm workers, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, dementia, or social isolation.
Julie (pictured, right, with farm favourite Smokey Joe) is the daughter of a now retired county council tenant farmer. Her dad had 50 acres near Shaftesbury and didn’t have any sons so she was the “workforce”.
“I guess that’s where my influence and interest comes from,” she says, “it was a proper community with about ten council farms in the valley and everybody helped each other.”
She became an educational social worker dealing with difficult children and found that, even though her clients lived in rural towns and villages, they would say they hated or feared the countryside, that it was boring and had nothing to offer.
“I didn’t know about care farming at the time, but I knew that us teenagers had managed really well and I started thinking what was it that we had that made our lives so good but that was making these young peoples’ lives so difficult.
“And that’s when I thought farming was the key – the skills and qualities the farming community could offer in terms of a sense of achievement, a sense of belonging and a sense of responsibility.”
She jumped in at the deep end and in 2006 took over her current 30-acre holding which has evolved into a fully-fledged not-for-profit social enterprise ‘Future Roots’.
Working with kids who have been totally excluded from the school system, Julie has seen some miraculous transformations, attributing this in no small measure to her beloved Simmental cows.
“With our supervision, the young people do everything – milking and calving and whatever else needs to be done as part of a team.
“But they have to abide by my rules. Although they know I’d go to the ends of the earth for them, I have strict rules and we’ve got to respect each other.”
Judging by what she has achieved to date and the recognition conferred by this major award, her hopes certainly seem to be coming to fruition – just like seeds and stock, visitors to Rylands flourish because they are nurtured and cared for.
To find out more visit
www.futureroots.net or call 01963 210703.
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