by Ananda Van Der Westhuizen

Created on: September 04, 2010

VISITING NAMPO AS ENRICHING EDUCATIONAL TOOL

Although Nampo Harvest Day is primarily an agricultural highlight on the farming community's calendar, nothing can keep dedicated educators from using this unique day to give our young students a hands-on experience.

It is a beautiful setting, among crops of varying sizes and cultivars. Although the traffic toward the entrance can be daunting, colourful flags greet you from a long distance away, motivating little people to get quite excited and overly active in their seats. Although we know nothing of the agricultural industry, every visitor is met with a visible order in which daily business happens.

First the land needs to be prepared with implements. With this in mind the educational process can start on an antique high with the exhibition of the first implements used. Who better, than a willing grandfather to demonstrate how seeds are stripped from one head after the other. Well known brands exhibit a whole family of tractors dating back from the early 1900’s opening up a wealth of discussion and comparison. A further bonus, are the exhibition of early and even the most recent patents. These patents amaze the visitors by focusing on the simple yet useful and functional ideas our creative minds can exhibit. Our young learners seem to experience an explosion of ideas when they are surrounded by somebody else manifested ideas. Throughout the visit, there are ample opportunity to allow young visitors to ask questions, touch, taste and climb.

This is a festival that started many years ago with the purpose of bringing all the products and services to the farming community together, enabling and empowering them to farm more economically. The original team envisioned this Harvest Day to grow and now it is one of the greatest agricultural festivals in the world. It is truly a pride and joy to South Africa and the Free State Province where it is situated. Our young students might not know this, but with something for young and old, farmer and not, it is a date worth noting on your calendar.

 Further on a wide variety of heavy duty implements are handsomely exhibited. To see a picture of a harvester in a magazine is quite amazing but to see this unique piece of equipment in from of you is enough to take the small talk away for a moment. The plough disks become an open discussion when our little ones can see how it cuts through the ground right in front of their eyes. One of our accompanying young ones gasped

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