Fun for the whole community at Fordell School agriculture day

Concentration is key for Blake Sollitt as he hammers away at trying to win the young farmers final. Photo / Stuart Munro

Four Fordell School students are moving at a frantic pace alongside each other.

It's the young farmers final. The students are tasked with dragging wool packs full of pine cones, balancing ping pong balls, throwing horseshoes and hammering staples.

Their friends from Rata, Kowhai, Tawa and Miro house groups make their voices heard as they cheer their representatives on at the top of their lungs.

The Fordell School Ag Day is a key annual event in the township located about 10 minutes outside of Whanganui.

This is the second year teacher Rachel Morrison has helped to organise the event and she said the students get a lot out of it.

"With the house challenges especially, there's been a lot of teamwork involved.

"The students have had to talk to judges, so they're building their confidence in talking to different adults about how they care for animals."

The seniors also had to organise the juniors and get them involved in a bake sale, which was good practice for their leadership skills.

The event is actually the culmination of a week focused on agriculture at the school, in which students created clay sculptures, studied bees and talked farm.

"This morning our lambs all came to school. The categories the students are judged on are leading and calling and relationship and condition," Morrison said.

"This year because of M. bovis, we didn't have calves come to school, but students could enter in a video of their calf at home."

House competitions had the juniors leading and feeding lambs, middle schoolers participating in a three-legged gumboot race and seniors in a drenching competition.

In the teachers vs parents competition, the parents came out victorious.

"We're really lucky here at Fordell that our community is so supportive," Morrison said.

"We really rely on them for this day, the docking pens that they bring in for all our activities, the stock we use for the drenching and the organisation of it."

Mars Petcare and Affco also helped out by sponsoring the event that really came into its own after parent Cath Cranstone amped it up a few years back.

Morrison was looking forward to a prizegiving ceremony in the afternoon and said some big events left at the school before the year are camps and athletics.