Beginning in 2010 Willow Brook Farm in association with the Soil Association Food for Life Partnership and Natural England started running School Visits for Year 4 (9 year olds) from a local village school. The aim is to have an ongoing commitment to show the children where some of the food they eat comes from, conservation issues and how we are encouraging wildlife back on to the farm. We also hope to give them an insight into what happens on an organic farm throughout the farming year.

These visits are structured so that the children get to see how the countryside changes through the academic year with three visits, in autumn, spring and the summer.

We offer a varied number of activities, including an introduction to the farm on the first visit and a farm walk, running through to life with the soays and 'hands on' feeding opportunities in the spring.

Willow Brook has a number of different wildlife habitats around the farm which gives a good range of study situations or 'spotting' locations for the children to identify plants, animals and insects.

We actively encourage questions throughout the visits and are always welcome to discuss what we do and why we do it, our staff are CEVAS trained.

We have found this a very rewarding and interesting project to set up and run, and hope that we can evolve this side of the farm more over the coming years.

We hope in the future to be able to offer different types of study both classroom and field based which can be linked to the national curriculum and even further into adult education by the way of offering a location for day classes to be run in a pleasent rural location.

It is our hope at Willow Brook Farm that by the way we introduce young people into farming and show them some of our conservation projects we like to think that we are sowing a little seed that someday may lead to someone or some people taking up a career in agricuture or an agricultural related industry.