On Wednesday, eight children in Year 5 went on a short trip to Tuesley Farm as part of their food technology lesson. Due to Covid restrictions, there are no practical lessons currently as the risk of cross contamination is too high. Instead, they have started learning about ‘where food comes from’.
During this topic the focus has been on factory productions of different foods and the Hall family kindly agreed to show us around their farm and, very excitingly, their new state of the art blueberry pack house.
During their tour around the pack house the children learnt some really interesting facts, including:
– During 2020 Tuesley farm have packaged:
4000t – strawberries
1600t – blueberries
1000t – raspberries
50t – blackberries
– Their blueberry grader can sort 1400kg per hour. During the process, they take off all the debris, remove all the small berries and photograph all individual berries 50 times each to examine the quality of the berry to make sure they are up to the best standard possible.
The children then enjoyed a tractor ride in the trailer through the fields to the tunnels where the berries grow. Each child got a punnet of blueberries to sample en route and then an empty punnet to pick their own berries. This was definitely a big hit!
Thank you very much to the Hall family for having us.
