‘Plant Your Pants’ with Country Trust (and the Six Inches of Soil team)
Filming with children from Winhills Primary School in Cambridge
Last month, we had a fantastic day filming with some children from Winhills Primary School in Cambridge, on Tom Pearson’s farm with Amrita Huggins from Country Trust and one of our principal characters, Adrienne Gordon. On World Soil Day on 5th December, Country Trust is launching its brilliant new campaign ‘Plant Your Pants’. We spoke to Jill Attenborough, Chief Executive of Country Trust to find out more…
Can you tell us more about Country Trust and how you work with schools, children and farms?
Country Trust is a national education charity dedicated to bringing alive the working countryside for children least able to access it. Over the last 44 years, we’ve connected well over half a million children with the land that sustains us all, through food, farming and countryside experiences. We take around 20,000 children a year to working farms and teach around 1600 children a year how to grow and cook their own food. We also immerse around 800 children a year in the countryside for three to five days on residentials, and over the last two years, since Covid, we've sent farm centred hands-on experiences into schools providing access to around 36,000 children a year.
How do you identify the schools and how does that relationship work?
Our starting point is to work with schools that have a higher-than-average percentage of children eligible for free school meals. We also work with schools that provide for children with special educational needs and disabilities. And outside of schools, we work with groups supporting refugees, asylum seekers, young carers and vulnerable families. We would consider all of these children to be disadvantaged when it comes to access to the countryside. We have a network of coordinators around the country who build relationships between schools and farms and they deliver our programs. They're either taking children to farms, running our residentials or going into schools and teaching children to grow, cook and so on.
Do the children understand regen farming and the differences with industrial farming?
Farmers manage farms in many different ways and we want children to be empowered to make informed decisions. They have the opportunity to visit all sorts of farms and to see all sorts of ways of managing the land. Underneath all that we want them to develop their curiosity, to feel confident and to feel connected to nature and the land. Then the children start to ask questions, they want to know more and understand that the way the land is managed really matters, in terms of the food produced, to our own health and to the health of the planet.
We’re increasingly seeing farmers taking soil health really seriously and that’s becoming more of a theme in our visits when children get their hands in the soil. Also, there's nowhere for farmers to hide, if they dig up an area of soil and the children do a worm count and there are no worms, why is that? Farmers want children to understand the challenges they're facing and that’s important.
Do you take soil scientists on the farm visits? How deep do you go with the children in terms of soil ecology?
These are primary school aged children and many have had no previous exposure to the land or to the countryside, so we start at the beginning. It's about guiding children to notice and to think, what am I looking for? We did a survey recently with Child Wise and over half of seven-to-10-year-olds thought that soil is just dirt. I think the same is true of most adults. We want children to start out being curious and to look for things and from there they will develop in different ways. Some will say wow this is what I want to be involved with. For other children it's an experience that's formative and will stay with them but may not be quite so life changing. Once they’ve developed that curiosity and have learnt to observe, to then start asking questions about why this matters. The Plant Your Pants campaign is going to be the first opportunity to really connect children with soil scientists. Up until now our work has been with children and farmers but now we’re bringing in the scientists and that's going to be a really exciting combination. There's so much to learn about the soil and enabling children to be part of that journey of discovery is really important. The scientists have told us that they’re really excited about the questions the children are going to ask them. What are they going to notice? How are they going to move the conversation forward?
Children come out with some quite big statements and we see that moment of transformation when a child will say, before, if I saw a spider or a worm I would squash it, but now I know differently. I think that is a transformative moment when children realise that we're part of the biodiversity, that’s really important.
Can you tell us more about the Plant Your Pants campaign?
Our mission is to connect children with the land and when we were first thinking about this, we decided that the most fundamental connection is getting your hands in the soil. So few children have that opportunity, lots of children that we work with attend schools that don't have any green space, so contact with the natural world and with soil is really limited. So, we thought let's not jump way ahead of ourselves, let's start with the basics of getting children's hands in the soil. Then we became aware that planting pants is something that's been done around the world and we thought well let's do what's obviously working. I've had really good conversations with the University of Zurich who've previously done a big campaign.
Then we talked to soil scientists in the UK and everybody agreed that this was a really good way to make the invisible life of the soil visible. Also, it’s fun to bury pants but it can just be a piece of cotton, as long as it's a natural material that's fine. We had quite a lot of discussion to see if we could provide the scientists with robust data that could further aspects of soil science. Their response was that the most important aspect is to spark the children’s curiosity. They said they don't want us to set parameters, they just want us to open children's eyes, get their hands in the soil, help them to see what's there and go from there.
Plant Your Pants registration will open on World Soil Day on 5th December and anyone in the country can take part – schools or individuals. Our eligible schools, which are schools that are working with disadvantaged children, can register for a pack to be sent to them that will contain two pairs of pants, plant markers and activity sheets, which focus on how to look at the soil, how to feel it and how to smell it. It helps them to get started so that when the children plant those pants they can start to think in a scientific way and to consider what might happen and why. For everyone else, all of those resources are going to be available digitally. We want all of the planting ideally to take place during British Science Week, 10th – 19th March 2023. The theme of this year’s Science Week is ‘Connections’. Then sometime in June, before the end of the summer school term, we want the pants to be dug up.
It’s not just children and families taking part, farmers will too and we’re also hoping some politicians will be involved. We want it to be really accessible so if all you’ve got is a window box then plant them in there and see what happens. When people dig them up, we want them to upload their photos and their findings to a map that we'll have available and then we can start to get a national picture of what our soil looks like. We'll also have a live event so that people can ask their questions to the scientists and we can really get that conversation going. We'll also be supporting children to start to take action for soil, speaking up for soil. They can write to their local MP, they can write to a scientist to say what they’ve found. We want children to take action in terms of improving the health of their own soil that they might have access to at school, again whether that's a raised bed, allotment, or planters. Some children will be visiting farms and watching the farmer dig up their pants. We want children to go on and explore further so we'll be supporting teachers to carry on with that learning. We also want the campaign to grow year-on-year. Our ambition is to become a nation that understands soil and recognises that we've all got a part to play.
Amrita Huggins, Country Trust (left) and Six Inches of Soil principal Adrienne Gordon (right) talk soil health with children from Winhills Primary School
When you see a child or children make that first connection with soil how does it make you feel?
It's overwhelmingly wonderful. We gather feedback after every one of our activities. We did around 700 farm visits in England last year and we asked teachers to observe and to feedback if there’s any particular child that's been changed. We share the stories that come in within our organization and they move us to tears. That moment for a child could be transformative, not only transformative for them but for us all.
Two beautiful examples of feedback that we’ve received are:
“His language and communication was brilliant to see. During the bug hunting, he was so excited that he was sharing and shouting with me 'Look, Miss, See. Look at this'. when usually he hardly talks at all.” Teacher talking of a student with very basic English.
“One child really shone today in her curiosity about the soil ecosystem, finding millipedes and centipedes and discovering the difference between detritivores and carnivores."
How important do you think Six Inches of Soil is in spreading the importance of soil health?
I think the work that you're doing to highlight the importance of understanding and respect for soil is really vital. There’s a David Attenborough quote, “No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced”. That statement is so true and going back to the survey that we did, people generally treat soil like dirt and that can’t go on. The work that you're doing to help raise everybody's awareness about that, and the fact that we're all involved in this as custodians of the soil is really important. Farmers and land managers look after three quarters of our land area but we're all involved in this. I think this first step that you're taking to raise awareness is brilliant. I can't wait to see the film.
