Lambing time at the farm offers food for thought

However, one Yorkshire couple have been providing the public with such an insight for several years, showing visitors young and old what goes into feeding the nation.

Geoff and Margaret Sykes, owners of Towthorpe Grange Farm near Strensall, York, have been organising visits to allow the public to view lambing in action for the past few years, as well as numerous other activities to let people really get a taste for life on a farm.

Schoolchildren from across Yorkshire visit the farm with teachers and parents for much of the year, this spring's lambing season having been particularly busy in terms of numbers.

Mrs Sykes told the Yorkshire Post: "We take out classes in the trailers when they come up here but really put on anything for the public. On Saturdays we were running three trailer rides a day.

"We take them around to show them the ewes when they are lambing each year. We put them in a nice marquee, which have nice little lambing pens so that each ewe can be with their lamb after it is born for the bonding. After a while we let them run around together before we let them go outside."

Mrs Sykes said the visits were part of a concerted effort to educate the public, since doing so was one of the family's original goals when establishing the business. She said she was impressed at how popular the lambing programme had been on TV and was gratified that interest in what she and her husband had been doing was blossoming.

"The adults are just as interested as the children," she said. "We always have schoolchildren round from Easter onwards really, before that it is too cold.

"One year a group of children even got to see a lamb being born. We always tell them when we go in to be really quiet, just as if they were going into a maternity ward. Everyone expects different things."

Mrs Sykes said that the way the country had developed in recent years meant that the general public had lost touch with farming and food production and that she felt it was important to re-establish that connection from an early age.

"Geoff will take the children around, explaining how everything works," she said, describing what happens on the visits.

"In farming today everything has to be big. The balance has gone and the public are just not aware of what is going on. It used to be, you would go potato picking in October time and school holidays would be spent involved in the farming world – you were used to being on the land.

"We had one young lad who was from a rural village who thought potatoes grew on trees. People are growing up with that gap now and we have to bridge it."

As well as getting to see the lambs children are able to help bottle feed them and ask questions of Mr Sykes. A purpose-built room has been created for the school visits and children who come in are given a few key facts about farming, as well as produce from the area, to take back to their classrooms for other children to discover.

"The countryside would not be as it was if it were not for farmers," she said.

Lamb is said to be Britain's favourite meat, with an estimated 16 million of the animals being born in the UK every spring.

From their mixed-use 152-acre farm, home to Aberdeen Angus cattle, Gloucester Old Spot and Saddleback pigs and 70 kinds of vegetables, the Sykes family run their own award winning farm shop, the Farmer's Cart which has doubled in size since they started it eight years ago and includes a butchery and delicatessen.

Everything grown on the farm is sold in the cafe and the business has won numerous awards over the past few years.

The farm is open to children and school visits from now until October.

Call 01904 499183 for more information.