00:00A classroom fit for crops and high school students.
00:08Boy Up Brook District High School has reopened its farm program two decades after it was
00:14shut down.
00:15That's just great, we've learnt skills that I might have never learnt how to do.
00:19Giving students a chance to learn about key industries in their community.
00:23Learning about soil depth.
00:25I'd like to be in both farming and the shearing industry so I can, you know, just experience
00:34a lot of things to do with the farming and agriculture.
00:37As well as getting first hand farming experience, students have been able to enrol in their Certificate
00:431 in agriculture.
00:45It can help me with understanding on different things, like I don't do much cropping myself,
00:50I'm more on the cattle side of it.
00:53But yeah, it takes me to new farms that I haven't been to.
00:56I guess it's good to add extra experiences to the students, help students to be able
01:01to pick schools after Boy Up.
01:03It is fun, but yeah, you get to work with a bunch of different people that you wouldn't
01:06normally work with, I guess, yeah.
01:09Students today have come out to watch a local farmer plant barley.
01:13The crop behind me is a part of the Boy Up Brook Community Cropping Initiative, which
01:17is all about raising funds for local sporting facilities.
01:21But today, it's about something else.
01:24It's giving these students that on-farm experience.
01:27The community in Boy Up group want it and they need it and the students love it.
01:31They constantly ask, can we go up the farm?
01:34Can we go and do something on the paddies?
01:36It's also proving to be a way of increasing student engagement and enrolments.
01:41The Cert 1 in Ag is the most popular course.
01:44We have quite a lot of the Year 9 and 10 students electing to do the Ag course.
01:48Last year, we had zero Year 10s remaining in our high school.
01:51This year, we had 13.
01:53Yeah, this is better than Math and English, I reckon.
01:55A town proving it's not all about pens and paper.
01:58A town proving it's not all about pens and paper.
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