DEREK and Kirrily Blomfield had a family of visitors out in a paddock with about 300 head of cattle when one of the visiting children said, “I want to go back to the farm.”
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It sort of awakened us to the fact that, to a lot of these kids, in the storybooks and at the show a ‘farm’ is the petting zoo.
- Derek Blomfield
Confused at first, they realised the little boy meant back to the homestead, where he’d been playing with the Blomfields’ pets: dogs, guinea pigs and so on.
Mr Blomfield says this is an example of why they signed up with Visit My Farm, an online platform that aims to strengthen the rural-urban connection and give farms another income stream.
“It sort of awakened us to the fact that, to a lot of these kids, in the storybooks and at the show a ‘farm’ is the petting zoo,” he said.
“I can understand that, because it’s the small, cute and fluffy animals.
“The parents weren’t under that same illusion.”
Mr and Mrs Blomfield run The Conscious Farmer at their property Colorado, Quirindi, and already give tours to their clients.
“We’ve always had a open-gate policy for our beef customers if they want to come to the farm and see what happens, but this an opportunity to throw it open to a wider group,” Mr Blomfield said.
“We just saw the opportunity to re-engage the people producing the food with the people eating the food.
“Kirrily and I see it really as a two-way avenue; it’s not just that the consumers have lost touch with where and how their food produced … the two groups are out of touch with one another.”
Visit My Farm is an agritourism trial project that was launched in January 2017 and currently lists four New England farms.
Although Colorado hasn’t had any visitors through the program yet, Mr Blomfield said he wanted “whatever the season is, whatever the conditions are, just to show it for how it is”.
“We really like to promote to people that, actually, food production doesn’t necessarily equal land or climate degradation, so we like to raise that awareness that we can actually produce food in ways that are healing landscapes or in synergy, even, with our environment.
“Just to show the realities of what it is to be in agriculture and what’s involved in that. Also what it isn’t – it isn’t a petting zoo.”