And while she is quick to deflect any praise, most of that can be attributed to local farmer and mother-of-four Natalie Cameron, who has been the driving force behind breathing new life into the school’s farm.
"Natalie puts a lot of time into this wee group to ensure they are learning as much as they can.
"Part of the way she does this is by using her own connections with rural professionals so that they are able to come in and help out with teaching the kids that wee bit more.
"Natalie herself puts in a lot of work ... both with general maintenance as well as with looking after the sheep and chickens.
"She fully deserves all the kudos and recognition for all of the hard work she puts in," the nomination said.
Natalie and her husband Dougal are sheep and beef farmers and, as well as being involved in the couple’s own farming operation, Natalie puts time, effort and resources into helping grow the Limehills School farm group.
The school has a small farm the group uses for learning opportunities and it had somewhat fallen through the cracks in recent years until Natalie took over at the beginning of last year.
It’s about 2ha and runs 16 sheep at present. Natalie wants to bump that up to 20 given the free fertiliser supplied by Ballance has resulted the grass pumping along — while she is looking at replacing the school’s chooks for the spring.
Eggs are sold by the group at Friday assemblies, giving them money to buy feed, and the children also collect food scraps at the school for them.
This lambing season, the children are responsible for checking the lambing ewes, while Natalie is on hand every morning and night for additional oversight.
There are 12 children in the group and the older children train the younger ones. At the school’s pet show day, the year 7 pupils ran an open day and had questions in every paddock.
Every child in the group had a turn of setting up a break fence, which gave them a sense of achievement and responsibility, as it was "their farm", not hers and she was happy to facilitate anything they wanted to do, Natalie said.
There was a field trip to look at tractors and a trip to a lime works, which included some science work, and the children designed and made their own boot rack — with a little help from a school dad — so they did not leave their boots lying around at the school.
With her own children ageing out of primary school at the end of this year, her days were numbered, Natalie said. She hoped there could be a committee to share the load and she could work with the group occasionally and still "keep a finger in".
While a commitment had been involved, "the more we get it sorted, the better it is going" and it had been "real fun" and rewarding, particularly when she could see their brains engaging.
"It’s cool to see how far they’ve come," she said.
She also looked after junior rugby at the DLS club and it was the connection with people through her community involvement that she loved, she said.
