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HRH launches the Year of Food and Farming at the Duchy Home Farm

11th September 2007

The Prince of Wales today spoke of the need for children to understand where their food comes from as he launched the Year of Food and Farming at Home Farm on the Highgrove estate in Tetbury, Gloucestershire.

The Year of Food and Farming campaign hopes to reconnect children with food and the countryside by encouraging them to grow their own food and visit local farms.

In a speech, The Prince said he was "battling" to save school farms and gardens, so pupils could learn directly about food produce.

The Prince warned that youngsters growing up in cities and towns are alarmingly ignorant of the countryside and how food is produced. 

His Royal Highness said that the research published today by the Year of Food and Farming into children’s knowledge of the countryside, agriculture and food was ‘pretty terrifying stuff’.

Some of the findings made by the report:

• Firstly, one in five children never visit the countryside – that means that more than one million children across the country have absolutely no contact with the land;

• Secondly, a fifth of children say they have never picked and then eaten fruit;

• Thirdly, children in England aged between 11 and 15 now spend 55 per cent of their waking lives watching television and computers. That is equivalent to about 53 hours a week in front of a screen - a rise of 40 per cent over the last ten years!;

• Fourthly, that children without any experience of rural life are twice as likely to admit they don’t know where their food comes from.

The research also revealed that one in five youngsters had never visited the countryside and a further 17 per cent said they had only been "once or twice". Children were also more likely to go on holiday abroad than visit the fields and farms on their own doorstep.

The Prince regularly invites schools to the Duchy Home Farm – already this year the farm has been visited 12 times, involving 250 children. Two of the schools involved were visiting the farm again today, Avening Primary school in Tetbury and Oathall Community College from Haywards Heath in Sussex.

His Royal Highness said there was evidence that children who had "contact" with the countryside scored higher on tests of concentration and self-discipline.

Pupils who participated in outdoor education programmes also tended to achieve better academic results, while working with farm animals often boosted children's self-confidence, he said.

"The tragedy is that people don't know increasingly where food comes from," he said.

"One of the great tragedies is this country seems to be less connected than the rest of Europe. That's worrying, so I think it helps enormously if children have this connection by growing things.

"Interestingly, that programme Jamie Oliver did about school dinners was very revealing. He couldn't get them off the Turkey Twizzlers until he got them growing something, cooked them and then ate them. It's that connection which is so vital."

Speaking to around 200 delegates, The Prince said: "At the end of the day, we should be under no illusions as to the importance of this whole Year.

"It is about rescuing today's generation of over-industrialised children, about instilling in them a life-long appreciation of food and the way it is produced, and reconnecting them with nature so that they may have a better understanding of why it is so precious to the health and well-being of each and every one of us."

Around 50 students from Oathall Community College in West Sussex and Avening Primary School in Tetbury had been invited to tour The Prince's Duchy Home Farm earlier in the day.

They were shown how to make bread rolls from scratch and even grind their own flour.  The Prince joined them in their task and joked that they had had much more practice than him.

Later His Royal Highness chatted to children as they pulled carrots from the soil for everyone, including The Prince, to eat.

Amongst the guests at the launch was farmer Jimmy Doherty, star of the BBC series Jimmy's Farm.

He said the Year of Food and Farming was a fantastic idea and would help attract younger people into the industry.

"For me, getting children into agriculture is probably one of the most important things in the industry. They are the lifeblood. We need to bring new people into farming if we are to keep it going."

Click here to read The Prince’s speech.
Click here to visit the Year of Food and Farming website.