RAU Farms transcript

The campus is fantastically situated and we can literally walk straight out of the classroom door. We can be talking literally what we've been discussing within the lab or within the lecture theatre straight out and apply that knowledge that we've just picked up there into a practical scenario so it's absolutely fantastic. Most of the lecturers here either come from farming backgrounds or they do have farms themselves. They really know what they're doing and they always give examples of what they know to what they're teaching you we've got what we call RAU Farms; our main farm is based outside of Coates and it's called Manor Farm and here under sort of the RAU farms umbrella we're farming around 250 hectares of land which is a mixture of permanent pasture and arable crops. My favourite module so far has been soil and environment science just because it's quite sciencey, obviously very hands-on every lecture we go out to the field and collect samples and I find it really interesting. We've got this educational access agreement with a larger estate that's nearby, so the Bathurst estate, which is fantastic that we can access them access their information as a larger commercial farming enterprise. The Bathurst estate covers roughly six thousand hectares so it's a very large historic estate we're farming about three and a half thousand hectares we have a large dairy unit with 950 cows and attached to that also as a biogas plant which utilizes the manure from the cows they're seeing a real-life estate functioning with the many different parts of that stage all working together to ensure that it continues for the next generation. There's lots of options for all our students so whether you're studying the environment, food, and society course, they look about what we're doing from an environmental sustainability perspective. The rural land managers might come out here and do buildings valuations so they're learning from a land agency perspective. Agriculture courses that they're coming out they're learning how to manage fields they're changing looking at what policies happening in British farming. Having quite a few field trips out and about to actually see what we're learning one week in practice the next week is really great. As much as they put into it they should get out of it the information's there it's a great asset to have on their doorstep to see how a proper commercial farm functions.