Education

We firmly believe that people based in towns and cities should be able to experience the life and workings of the countryside, so they can see for themselves the thriving industry that goes on within it. This helps bridge the gap between urban and rural life and enables people to fully appreciate and understand where their food comes from. We feel this is particularly important for children.

At Packington Free Range, we want to help educate the next generation and ensure farming remains relevant in today’s society. We want children today to not only appreciate what an exciting and skilled industry it is, but we also want to arm them with knowledge about how farmers work to ensure environmental sustainability, consistency in the product, food safety and animal welfare.

Farmlink

We run our own education project through Farmlink, which is a food and farming education charity. At Packington Free Range, it is really important to us that children make a connection between food and farming, learn about where their food comes from, and understand more about the environment and conservation.

We host school visits at our dedicated site at Blakenhall Park, where local schools can come and visit free of charge. Our tours are between 10am-2pm, and children participate in a variety of activities, such as crop walks, pond dipping, farm activities and woodland activities. They will also meet pigs and sheep and learn more about farm animals and produce. Tours can be tailored to suit different school topics. For more information, please visit our website www.farmlink.org.uk

In-School Visits

During the winter we offer free school talks. Our FarmLink representatives visit classrooms to deliver a farm workshop enabling children to view first-hand our cereal crops, model machinery and even a live chicken. In total, we hope to help educate around 5000 children a year!

To contact us about booking your school in for a tour or talks please contact education@packingtonfreerange.co.uk or call 01283 711547.

Supporting Communities both Locally & Further Afield

We have lived in and been part of the Staffordshire community for four generations. All of us at Packington Free Range have experienced first-hand the benefits of a strong community spirit, so it makes perfect sense to us that we should do what we can to support both our own community, and those a little further afield.

Being part of a community is, amongst many other things, fun and we try to celebrate this. Over the years, we’ve hosted ‘Freedom Fest,’ a local festival with sports tournaments, gift and cake stands, Packington Free Range hog roasts, music and dancing. Over the last two festivals, we’ve raised over £22,000 for the British Heart Foundation and the Rainbows Children’s Hospital. We also sponsored the Pig Parade, a fun, creative, charitable auction organised by the Lichfield Festival.

Further afield, Rob’s worked with young men in Ghana, encouraging, educating and supporting them on their local small holdings to provide safe food for them and their families, as well as creating jobs in their local community.

Delivering affordable fresh food to families with young children

Fresh food is essential to keep children and adults healthy. As farmers ourselves, we want to get more people enjoying the delicious, fresh food that is produced by UK farmers.

The aim of the project is to educate and inspire families to eat more fresh food and by doing so, improve public health. By distributing our food through local schools, we can educate the school children and their parents about the virtues of freshly grown, healthy food. We get the food direct from local farmers, package it up into separate family bags, which our volunteers then distribute direct to families at our selected schools.

Find out more at www.farmfreshrevolution.com

 

Open Farm Sunday

During the Summer, we open our Packington Fields Farm in Lichfield, for Open Farm Sunday. It’s an annual event, run by LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) which encourages farmers to show the public how we farm our crops, look after our animals and manage the countryside. Each year LEAF set a theme for Open Farm Sunday which means different practices are shown each year.

Our events attract around 3,500 people annually. We offer tractor and trailer rides around the farm which allow visitors to see the sows, the piglets, and their outdoor homes, up close. At the end of the tour, there’s even a chance to handle a piglet, which is a favourite with children!

In the main field, there’s always a fabulous BBQ and Hog Roast to be enjoyed. We work together with local businesses and contractors to bring in the lorries used to transport our pigs and feed to the site, alongside our own sparkling agricultural machinery. Children are invited to climb inside and explore while learning about what each machine does.

It’s incredibly satisfying for us to share our passion for the land and our animals, and to see the field full of families enjoying sitting on bales, crawling over tractors and tucking into our pork for lunch.