Organo Et School is proud to enter the second year of Be A Farmer program, having successfully run for all 3 crop seasons in the year 2021-22. We launched the second batch of Be A Farmer program, Monsoon crop cycle on 26 Jun2022. The first batch of Monsoon crop cycle was conducted last year, starting July 2021.
All the participants of Be a Farmer Monsoon crop cycle, new batch, arrived at the Organo Et School children’s Farm campus on Sunday morning of 26 Jun 2022. The young farmers looked curious for things in store for them. OES team and farm coaches welcomed them all. Bringing everyone together and introducing themselves was done by an interesting ice breaker. Everyone experienced soil by removing their foot ware and walking barefoot in the farm. The resilience children show is admirable at times.
The farm session of the second Monsoon batch of OES Be a farmer program started with Coach Uma Iyer having an interactive dialogue about SOIL with children. She briefly touched upon soil and soil identification methods for farming. She then gave a small demonstration about soil preparation and sowing vegetable seeds and saplings. She emphasized the importance of spacing between 2 future plants, for which seeds were sown. This was followed by children in their respective farm patches, allocated by name boards with their names written on them.
Children very carefully replicated the steps demonstrated by Uma starting with raking and loosening the soil, sowing seeds by both broadcasting and row sowing methods. Followed by transplanting tomato and chilly saplings, covering the tiny saplings with a layer of mulch around them to protect them from heat and excessive evaporation. This was also helpful in controlling the weed growth and controlling competition for nutrients among crop plants and weeds.
This brought the session to the last activity of watering the farm patches. Kids ran up to the water source and filled up small buckets with water and came back to the respective patches. Farm coach Uma and Venkatesh help them by demonstrating watering in the correct manner. All of them followed the coaches well and having watered the farm patch well, looked immensely satisfied at the completion of the first farm session.
The OES team wished them luck and handed over Monsoon Crop Cycle Logbooks and a set of gardening tools. They were to fill up the Logbook page with farm patch drawing for their own patch as on ground for homework. This being the first session all parents who initially were anticipating this to be too much hard work, but by the end of it were very happy to have been able to connect their kids to soil in such an enjoyable manner.
We recognize that for any positive impact to be sustainable, it has to be long-term and inter-generational. Organo Et School strives to create an apt learning environment that will support and empower families as well as individuals to embrace sustainable living mindsets and habits.
Organo Et School is a learning initiative set up by Organo in 2017 and has been facilitating fields visits and workshops for Schools and Interest Groups. Organo Et School has had over 25+ schools, 6500+ students and 3000+ adults participate over the last 5 years.
We believe in connecting children & adults with nature. Connecting children with the natural world at a young age is the first step in creating responsible stewards of our collective future.
If you or your children are interested in the Be a Farmer program, please connect to us at oes@organo.co.in and by phone 9154100775 today!
