What a great Experience!
Fancy inviting a host of farmyard animals into your back garden?
The Mill Cottage Farm Experience, of Alton, is a mobile farmstead for hire that sets up pens of sheep and piglets at schools, playgroups and birthday parties.
The farm is educational and has been useful in teaching children about animals and where food on our dinner table originates from.
Owner Sarah Main (32) runs the farm with help from her husband Tom.
She said: "We have just started – I finished full time as a teacher last week.
"From now I am full time with the farm and we can attend schools and play groups, residential homes and all sorts, bringing farm animals for children and adults to them."
Sarah, a former resident of Pinewood Village in Bordon and teacher at Holme Primary School, came up with the idea of running a mobile farm after taking lessons in school.
She saw how excited and interested the children were whenever animals were brought into the classroom, so decided to set up a visiting farm herself.
"Originally it was a hobby farm just for our own self sufficiency – a bit like Tom and Barbara from the Good Life," Sarah said.
"But while I was teaching, I realised what an opportunity it was for children to experience what the animals are like."
After trialling it successfully on a part-time basis, Sarah decided to take the plunge and set it up as a full time operation.
It features sheep and lambs, pigs and piglets, chickens, goats and a turkey.
Sarah said: "Some children have only ever seen a turkey on their plate at Christmas so they don't even know what one looks like."
She added this made her male turkey one of the most popular attractions at the farm.
Mill Cottage Farm Experience can travel anywhere within an hour from home and a steady stream of bookings are in place already over the summer.
She said: "We have got a lot of bookings.
"Most of our Saturdays are booked up for birthday parties, school fetes and village fetes, that sort of thing.
"But what we are hoping for are bookings in the week for schools – we did one last year at Holme Primary School for instance which went really well."
On Bank Holiday Monday the farm held an open day at the Holybourne Theatre, where youngsters encouraged piglets to navigate a course by bribing them with food.
The day also included the chance to hold newly hatched Easter chicks, to bottlefeed young lambs, and see demonstrations by Holybourne Handmade Chocolates.
To find out more about Mill Cottage Farm Experience call Sarah Main on 01420 86206 or log on to www.mcfe.org.uk
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Weather for Petersfield
Sunday 27 May 2012
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Temperature: 10 C to 26 C
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Sunny spells
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