Jasmine Nixon Young Farmer

Young Farming Champion
Jasmine Nixon
On the 16th August 2013 Jasmine Nixon from Art4Agriculture came to teach us about her farm and beef.
Jasmine is from Crookwell, NSW which is just over an hour away from Avoca. She lives on a farm called Merryvale and keeps Angus cattle.
First she showed us a power point presentation about her farm and beef. She showed us a couple slides and then it came to a clip. The clip was about Jasmine, her farm and her cattle.
Then she went through some slides about her cattle and what happens to them when she sells them. She sells her cattle to a feed lot. The feed lot fattens up the cows that are then sold to the abattoir. The abattoir kills them then separates them to go to different butchers. Then the butchers sell the meat to us for us to eat.
At the end Jasmine said because we were such a good audience she was going to show us a video clip. The clip was a parody of the song Gangnam Style called Farmer Style.
After that we had to do an interview with Jasmine. We filmed it on an iPad.

Megan Rowlatt Eco Champion

Megan Young Eco Champion

Megan is a young eco champion; she came to Avoca Public School on August 9th 2013. Megan came to tell us about herself and her job as a Land Care specialist.
In a PowerPoint she told us a bit about herself. She grew up in Wollongong, loves to travel (she has been to lots of places) and she is an adventurer. She is also a nature lover. Megan graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Ecotourism on the Gold Coast. She worked for National Parks and Wildlife Service and now is the Illawarra Local Land services officer. Megan also won the 2012 National Young Land Care Leader of the year.
Then she showed us a video about what she does and about her job. She said she and her group work towards achieving the best outcomes for the environment as well the land holder. Megan also holds workshop days.
When she had finished showing us the other video about herself we went outside and had a picture with her. After a while of talking and asking questions we had to say goodbye. She will be coming back soon so we can ask her some more questions.
We really enjoyed Megan coming to our school to teach us more about sustainability and ways to be sustainable. The valuable sustainable practises we learned were to not let cattle near river banks and water ways because they will pollute the water with their droppings and will knock dirt from the river bank in there as well. Rotating cattle is very important because you need to keep the cattle and grass healthy. This will also make the cattle stronger. Weeds strangle other native plants and can kill cattle if they eat the flower fruit from the weeds.

Threats to Australian Farmers

Threats to farmers
Australian cattle farmers are care caretakers of 50 % of Australia’s land. They feed millions of people every day and the beef industry is responsible for thousands of jobs. Being a farmer in Australia is not a walk in the park. They face many threats from technology, poor markets and of course Mother Nature herself! We decided to focus on the natural disasters that farmers face.
Droughts
Australia is known for its long and hard droughts. Sometimes farmers go months without rain. Some impacts of a drought are:
. Crops need water, they will deteriorate meaning farmers can’t grow grain for their livestock. This also means that there is no crop for them to harvest and sell. If they don’t have the money from last year’s crop it makes it hard to afford to put the next year’s crop in.
. Farmers have to buy water. If they don’t have water in their dams they have to buy water. This is another cost they have to find money for.
. Crops have failed and no feed is growing in the paddocks because it is too dry. Farmers have to buy grain and because there isn’t much of it around it is expensive.
. 1864- 1866: A huge drought which affected every state in Australia except Tasmania. There was also a really bad drought from 2002-2006 where most of Australia was classified as being in drought.

Here are some photos from our teacher's farm in Western NSW in 2004





Floods are also a threat to Australian farmers. Floods occur when too much rain falls in one area. The floods that will impact on farmers are usually from long periods of rain that cause river banks to break. This sometimes causes flash flooding and if farmers don’t get enough warning to get their stock to higher ground they can drown.

Other impacts of floods include water logged crops. Too much water will drown the crops; this is not good for farmers because that is one of the main sources of their income.