There's a lot of muttering about how rubbish standard Agriculture courses are at Universities and Colleges, which may be unfair but it got me wondering whether it would be possible to design a course that actually taught students to farm regeneratively. I imagine a small farm run by the students, they'd work each morning on the land (or in the workshop, dairy, chicken plucking shed or wherever) and have lectures/seminars in the middle of the day, before afternoon milking, mob moving or whatever.
Obviously you need a grown-up or two to marshal the activities, but the really exciting thing about having engaged students about the place would be getting them to work out how to do more with less effort, something we are always talking about (in one way or another) on this forum. You'd want a decent workshop so they could make tools for planting pumpkin plugs into a cover crop or whatever problems they come up against. Handy to have a microscope to look at the soil, do faecal egg counts etc, but nothing too flash by way of a laboratory. Students would learn about economics by working out the cost of what they were doing against income generated and whether it is worth adding value to your products...butchering, milling, cooking, tanning, marketing etc. With a pool of labour you could carry on stacking enterprises onto the acreage and find out what works.
Graduates could then take the model to existing farms and confidently offer the old farmer a deal whereby both sides benefit, for instance the youngster gets to start a business with mobile chicken coops and the farmer gets live fertiliser spread over his meadows and a market for his dressed weed seeds. If the whole thing worked as well as it might, fees would be very low as the farm would make money. You wouldn't want too many students, which might make it a bit dull for them in the evenings, but you could easily replicate the model all over the place.
What do you think?
Obviously you need a grown-up or two to marshal the activities, but the really exciting thing about having engaged students about the place would be getting them to work out how to do more with less effort, something we are always talking about (in one way or another) on this forum. You'd want a decent workshop so they could make tools for planting pumpkin plugs into a cover crop or whatever problems they come up against. Handy to have a microscope to look at the soil, do faecal egg counts etc, but nothing too flash by way of a laboratory. Students would learn about economics by working out the cost of what they were doing against income generated and whether it is worth adding value to your products...butchering, milling, cooking, tanning, marketing etc. With a pool of labour you could carry on stacking enterprises onto the acreage and find out what works.
Graduates could then take the model to existing farms and confidently offer the old farmer a deal whereby both sides benefit, for instance the youngster gets to start a business with mobile chicken coops and the farmer gets live fertiliser spread over his meadows and a market for his dressed weed seeds. If the whole thing worked as well as it might, fees would be very low as the farm would make money. You wouldn't want too many students, which might make it a bit dull for them in the evenings, but you could easily replicate the model all over the place.
What do you think?