Smallholder training courses – find a smallholder training course at SmallholdingCourses.co.uk

SmallholdingCourses.co.uk is the UK’s leading directory of smallholding courses, craft and heritage courses, and other smallholding-related courses. Smallholder course providers from across the UK and beyond offer a whole variety of smallholder training courses to suit all needs.

Here are just some of the available categories:

The current available categories to submit your adverts to are:

• ANIMALS, LIVESTOCK AND POULTRY FOR SALE
• ALPACAS AND LLAMA COURSES
• BEEKEEPING COURSES
• BESPOKE SMALLHOLDING COURSES
• BUTCHERY COURSES
• CALVES, COWS AND CATTLE COURSES
• CHICKEN COURSES / POULTRY COURSES
• CRAFT COURSES
• FISH FARMING COURSES
• GOAT KEEPING COURSES
• GROW YOUR OWN COURSES
• HERITAGE COURSES
• HOLIDAYS ON A SMALLHOLDING
• HOMEMADE PRODUCE
• HORSE AND PONY COURSES
• LAND AND WOODLAND
• LIVESTOCK COURSES
• ORCHARD COURSES
• PERMACULTURE COURSES
• PEST CONTROL / PESTICIDE COURSES
• PIG COURSES
• PIG AND POULTRY COURSES COMBINED
• SELF-SUFFICIENCY COURSES
• SHEEP COURSES AND LAMBING COURSES
• SMALLHOLDER TRAINING COURSES
• SMALLHOLDERS ADVISORY SERVICES
• SMALLHOLDERS SKILLS COURSES
• SMALLHOLDING MACHINERY COURSES
• SUSTAINABLE BUILDING AND TECHNOLOGY COURSES
• WEBSITE SERVICES AND COURSES
• WILDLIFE & CONSERVATION COURSES

Find your smallholder training course at SmallholdingCourses.co.uk.

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SmallholdingCourses.co.uk
Smallholder Training Courses
Smallholding Courses

Booking someone onto a training course, or giving them a gift voucher for a course is certainly a great Christmas gift idea. There are lots of different courses and workshops available at Smallholding Courses so you’re bound to find one to suit that special person.

Here at SmallholdingCourses.co.uk many of our course providers offer Gift Vouchers – if you are not sure whether they do or not, just ask them – they’ll only be too happy to help.

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SmallholdingCourses.co.uk
Christmas gift ideas … but of course!
Smallholding Courses

Lifetime Membership at Smallholding Courses entitles you to upload an unlimited number of appropriate ads to the Smallholding Courses website any time throughout your lifetime membership – year after year.

Promote your smallholding-related courses and craft courses to a highly targeted, successful and established website.

Read more …

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SmallholdingCourses.co.uk
Lifetime Membership at Smallholding Courses
Smallholding Courses

A variety of smallholder workshops and smallholder training courses are to be found at SmallholdingCourses.co.uk. Whatever elements you want to pursue on your own smallholding, then you’ll find a smallholder course that covers it, here at Smallholding Courses.

You can choose to attend specific smallholder workshops that concentrate on a particular topic eg Keeping Sheep, or could decide to take a smallholder training course that covers various aspect of running a smallholding. View the current Smallholder Training Courses available via SmallholdingCourses.co.uk.

Browse the Smallholding Courses website.

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SmallholdingCourses.co.uk
Smallholder Workshops
Smallholding Courses

Here are the latest smallholder courses being held in September 2011 by smallholder training course providers listed on the SmallholdingCourses.co.uk website:

Smallholder Courses September 2011

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SmallholdingCourses.co.uk
Smallholder Courses September 2011
Smallholding Courses

Extra Date – SUNDAY 18th September

This is a day workshop where you will under supervision, make your own Warré style beehive.

Using a Warre hive is less invasive, uses less time and equipment and less cost than conventional beekeeping – it is beekeeping for the sake of bees rather than for us humans – and honey is considered a secondary bonus rather than the sole reason to keep bees

LADS and DADS? The day is a perfect opportunity for
Fathers and Sons to work together and make something worthwhile, however any responsible adult child combination is posisble and also just an adult .

There will up to 8 hives being built along with 2 tutors .

This style of hive is most advocated by natural beekeeping enthusiasts as it represent a ‘beehive for bees’ rather than for beekeepers.

The Warré hive is a top-bar beehive which differs from a conventional hive mainly in that the bees are encouraged to build their own comb vertically downwards from plain bars rather than in removeable wooden frames as in a conventional hive.

Building their own honeycomb entirely ( as they do in the wild) reduces the incidence of any potential wax borne challenges to a bee health, systemic or residual being passed from generation to generation through the wax.

There are many other fascinating reasons to consider a more matural form of Beekeeping and if you re interested please see our website for further details

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Greystoke Cycle Cafe
Build Your Own Beehiive for Natural Bee Keeping
Smallholding Courses

Shepherdess Cathy Cassie hosts a brand new course for 2012, focussing on preparation for lambing, covering feeding the in-lamb ewe, preparing your lambing areas, what to expect, what to avoid, and how to deal with the unexpected! There will be a small number of ewes lambing on the Cassie farm to coincide with this course, giving the opportunity for some hands-on practical sheep work. Please contact for details.

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Hazelwood Livestock
Preparation for Lambing, weds 17th January 2012
Smallholding Courses

There are various elements to running a smallholding – and those elements are decided by you, depending on what you want to do with your smallholding.

Arming yourself with smallholding skills will help you run your smallholding more smoothly, efficiently, and hopefully profitably!

Smallholding skills to acquire could be dairying and butchery, for example. The skills learnt have two benefits:

1. The knowledge of how to produce a certain product which you can sell (hopefully for profit)
2. Generate a income from passing on that knowledge to others in the form of training.

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SmallholdingCourses.co.uk
Smallholding skills
Smallholding Courses

Here at South Yeo Farm West we are delighted to say that smallholders with a CPH holding number who are based in the South West region are eligible for a 50% bursary for any of our smallholding courses up to July 2011. This includes our Introduction to Smallholding and Intermediate Smallholding weekends, Living with Livestock days (an introduction to sheep, pigs & cattle), Cattle for beginners, and DIY websites for farmers and smallholders courses.

Eligible smallholders and farmers based in the South West region, will have 50% of the course fees reimbursed through The Skills Project operated by Duchy College Rural Business School – please contact us for details. Our courses are also eligible for Lantra’s Women in Work scheme. Full details of all our courses can be found at www.smallholdertraining.co.uk

E: debbie@smallholdertraining.co.uk
Tel: 01837 810569
W: www.smallholdertraining.co.uk

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SOUTH YEO FARM WEST
Bursaries for smallholders in the South West
Smallholding Courses

This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed at home. This little piggy, however, enjoys living with a Lincolnshire family who has recently discovered how easy it is to add livestock to their smallholding. This month we investigate the pros and cons of adding livestock to your kitchen garden to produce your own home-reared meat…

Many with large gardens in Lincolnshire, with space set aside for a kitchen garden, delight in growing their own vegetables. This is often followed by keeping chickens and enjoying fresh eggs each morning. But keeping livestock seems to be a gulf that few Lincolnshire smallholders are inclined to cross.

Boston’s Jason James is hoping to change all that though, with a series of smallholder courses designed to help those seeking to reconnect with their food and with the countryside too.

Next month, he’ll be hosting his first Introduction to Pigkeeping course, a practical and theoretical one-day crash course in the art of keeping pigs both for food and fun.

“It was something we always wanted to do.”

Says Jason who created his smallholding in 2008 and last year added pigs to his vegetable plot.

“It was difficult to make an informed decision as there were no experts on hand. We want to host a day when people can make an informed decision about keeping pigs. For those who already have a smallholding there’s usually an intention to progress to chickens, but keeping livestock is often considered a little too involved.”

Jason’s courses began in September 2010, and have already included bee keeping, poultry keeping and a food safety course for smallholders.

Debuting in March, however, is a course designed to provide those who would love to keep pigs with all of the information they need to make an informed decision as to whether they’ve the room, time and money to ensure their animals’ welfare.

“The?courses are a combination of practical tuition and theory.” says Jason. “It’s the course we needed before we began to keep our animals.”

Originally from Sussex, Jason spent a decade travelling around the UK, and his time included a posting at RAF?Digby.

He eventually returned to the county with wife Fiona with the intention of having a little land upon which they could grow their own food and upon which the couple’s children, Harry, Lucy and Charlie could play in safety.

Help during the family’s acquisition of their curly-tailed chums came courtesy of neighbour Jasper Clark of Holme Farm

Poultry. The family were a little more savvy than most and already knew that there is no such things as ‘micro-pigs’ the urbanised fashion accessories eccentric

Hollywood stars think they can successfully domesticate. In fact, these breeds are inter-bred on the basis of their size but often grow to the full-size of any other pig.

Pedigree breeds are, on the contrary, a better bet – and the dimensions to which they grow are rather more predictable.

Domestic breeds can include the Middle White, Gloucester Old Spot, Berkshire and Welsh for those solely interested in meat, or more versatile breeds like the Kune Kune, adopted by Jason and family.

The breed may look a little less pleasing than their pink counterparts, but in Jason and Jasper’s experience, darker breeds yield a tastier meat with an excellent marbling of fat. Kune Kune pigs also have excellent temperaments and will quickly warm to their owners.

“They’re quite tame.” he says. “We have to remember that they’re being bred for meat, and try to stop ourselves becoming too attached to them. They’re not named – we just refer to them as ‘big pig and ‘little pig’ – but we’re happy to give them a stroke when we feed them, and they’ll happily sit when told to, if you’ve an apple in your hand.”

First things first then; to be legally compliant, it’s essential to to apply to DEFRA for a County Parish Holding number. Once registered, you can legally obtain livestock and will be assigned a Herd Number.

Each of Jason’s pigs – multiple animals is recommended as pigs are sociable animals and tend to become lonely – cost less than £50. The family anticipates having five or six by next month. Next comes accommodation. Pig arks cost less than £200, and though 6m2x6m2 is enough per animal, more room is always desirable.

A concrete base in the pen is serviceable, but pigs to enjoy snuffling around, and prefer soft ground.

“Weeded ground is especially ideal.” says Jason. “Pigs will voraciously clear grass, nettles or other foliage, and will fertilise the ground brilliantly.”

In terms of food, Jason and family feed their pigs a cereal based pellet mix twice a day, purchased for around £8 in 20kg bags.

Traditional wisdom says you can feed pigs kitchen scraps – they’d certainly eat them – but this is something DEFRA strictly prohibits. Any food that has passed through a shop or your kitchen may not be fed to pigs, though food grown on your grounds can.

In terms of veterinary care, Jason has found his Kune Kunes to be reasonably resilient, but he does recommend having a reliable vet with knowledge and experience of pigs at your disposal.

Whilst Jason and the family would describe having pigs as extremely rewarding, it’s important to remember that as smallholders you’re keeping them for meat.

Jason sends his animals off to slaughter once sufficiently fat. Many breeds are ready at 6-8 months, but Kune Kune pigs are slower growing and are at their best from 12-18 months of age, whereupon they weigh around 100 kilos. Jason calculates that his two Kune Kunes will keep a family of five in pork for six months, with one being sent to a local butcher every six months.

There’s certainly more labour involved in keeping pigs than popping to your local farm shop, but in terms of money, keeping pigs isn’t that expensive once you’ve established a smallholding setup. Whilst it’s no money saver, Jason and family argues that knowing how their food has been raised, and knowing exactly what their meat has been fed on is extremely important… they also value the education and respect for food it gives their children.

“We believe the final product has more flavour.” says Jason. “We’re can be confident of our animals’ welfare and we know they’ve not been raised in a factory environment.”

Keeping livestock isn’t for everyone, but for those with the time and space, it can be incredibly rewarding. Jason’s courses are unique in that they’ll provide would-be smallholders with the inspiration to return to a way of life that has been all but lost in the age of mass-produced food.

“There’s another benefit too.” reveals Jason. “Our animals produce the best crackling I’ve ever tasted for my Sunday roast… I can’t think of any greater incentive than that!”

Published by:
Leonard Cottage
This Little Piggy!
Smallholding Courses