Pupils from Wrenbury Primary School learned first hand about sustainable food production and healthy eating during a visit to Reaseheath College in Nantwich.

The event, held during the run-up to COP26, gave the children an insight into the state-of-the-art technologies which are revolutionising the food and farming industries and are supporting environmentally and sustainably friendly ways of producing nutritious and healthy food.

The group of 28 final year pupils watched cows being milked by robots, marvelled at the college’s new vertical farm, visited the industry standard Food Centre and planted their own salad crop.

Further visits are planned in which the same group will prepare meals using vegetables they have grown themselves. They will be taught by Reaseheath’s food technology students and follow recipes specially designed by a professional chef to celebrate Reaseheath’s centenary year.

Assistant Principal (Land based and Sustainability), Iain Clarke explained: “We want to give local school pupils a unique ‘field to fork’ experience which will introduce them to the entire food chain and help to bring their science lessons to life.

“During their visit here the Wrenbury pupils saw futuristic growing and food production techniques, began to grow their own produce and learned what a healthy, sustainable, plate of food should look like.

“This is the start of an exciting project and there is a passion and vision within Reaseheath’s ‘Field to Fork’ team to expand it to more schools in the Nantwich area.”

Wrenbury Head teacher Bessa Cador said: “Our visit to Reaseheath has fitted perfectly into our curriculum. We are a rural primary school and this term’s whole school theme is farming. It’s really important that our oldest children learn about the advances of technology in farming and are able to understand what opportunities the food industry could offer them in the future.”

“Our pupils have enjoyed comparing the robotic system of milking cows with the traditional parlour method and seeing how technology has moved on. They also found their visit to the vertical farm very interesting and gained an insight into the future of large scale farming. We are very much looking forward to learning more on our next visit.”

Alfie Nicholas, aged ten, said: “I liked being in the vertical farm. The LED lighting was really cool and it was good seeing how the solar panels made the electricity to run it.”

Watch the video here: https://bit.ly/FieldToForkOctober21