The 2024 Year 11 class have had their first official outing running part of an Ag Day at Hinds Primary School.

It was certainly one of those "throw the students in the deep end and see what happens” type situations. As always, our complete faith in PIA was proven as our Year 10 students ran 8 modules for 15 children at a time, covering things like stropping a trailer, vegetable identification, motorbikes & tractors, putting up an electric fence and a few fun/teamwork type activities such rob the nest with duck decoys, memory and drain pipe games, egg & spoon races with a dairy theme and puzzles.

Feedback from similar events this year included Richard Russell & Tom Batty’s speech at the PIA prizegiving

”This year we attended 2 shows, the Winchester and Fairlie, where we ran modules for the primary school kids, these included setting up a electric fence with standards and many more fun activities. Our biggest challenge was avoiding birds nests as the reels were wound up, always planning for the worst, we had 8 spare reels and we used them all. Although we were well organized, once we added little kids a lot of our organization went out the window.
We realized that if we ever have children of our own we need to be well prepared. Both days were a lot of fun and the modules ran well and we were really happy to see the kids go back to their parents so we could relax with fudge and Fonterra milk.

The Hinds Day had few dramas with ex-PIA student Ann-Maree Reith now a teacher at Hinds School being the brains behind the day and ensuring great success.

A message from Anne-Maree: 

“Every year at Hinds School we have a pet day / country day and this year I decided to add some agricultural learning into our day. I was fortunate enough to get in contact with Sarah Foley-Smith and her Primary Industries Academy Team. Hinds is a small country school with alot of farmers and I wanted this to show in our country day. Sarah and her crew made my vision for the day come true with rotations of all different areas of agriculture and a heap of new learning. We as a staff were thoroughly impressed with how they arrived, set up and were ready to go, all friendly and happy to chat. The tamariki had an amazing time taking part in the rotations (some saying it was the highlight of their day). We had alot of comments from whānau who thought it was a great idea and loved that we had some older tamariki from a closeby school building connections. We all just wanted to say big thank you for the tamariki being able to come out and to Sarah for the organization and her well run team. We were all more than impressed.

Job done.