The results of our Courses survey

The results of our Courses survey

The results of our Courses survey 150 150 Gabby Dolan (GTO)

We can’t do courses for you right now…

But the good news is that when we’re back to fulfilling our brief as the Small Farm TRAINING Group, we’ll know what courses you want.

You’ll no doubt remember that way back in February / March, when the world was a simpler place, we asked you for your thoughts via a couple of interminably long surveys. 

We recently shared the results of the website survey with you.

Now it’s the turn of the second survey, about which courses – and types of courses – you’d like us to run.

As before, the full results of the survey can be downloaded from our website, but here’s a bit of a summary.

You’d like a course on growing in polytunnels. 


That was the number one piece of feedback that our members had! No fewer than nineteen people said that they’d either come on that course right now, or would definitely be interested at some point!  So, I’ll definitely be doing my best to put one of those together as soon as I can.

And all I can say is: You’d better come. None of this Oh I’m not free that day..

I’m not interested in hearing But Sir, £240 is way too much for a 1-hour polytunnel course! 

I’ll be running a Polytunnel course, and I’ll expect to see you all there. Okay?!

What else?

Well, Cheese-Making is popular, so I’ll do my best on that one too (although that one, to be serious for a moment, is likely to be a bit more pricey).

And generally, courses on land management, pasture management, weed management and suchlike also seem popular – as do courses involving doing such things in a broadly “natural” way – as you’d probably expect from our group.

Less popular were courses on lamb butchery…

… and pig butchery…

…which may (or may not) be good news for our porcine and ovine friends.

There were a number of courses which seemed on first glance to be no-go options, but in fact I think could be of interest, as long as we could run them for smaller groups. Amongst these might be cider-making:

and black-smithing:

Both of these seem to have a strongly negative set of results, but actually 4 – 6 people in each case said they’d really be interested.

Incidentally, on the subject of cider, I’ve got a really, really interesting visit planned later this year to a traditional cider-makers, if we’re all out of lock-down… More on that later this year, hopefully.

Those are just a few of the interesting points raised by your responses to our survey. I’d like to take this chance to thank you once again for your time, and your willingness to share your thoughts, and I look forward to being able to run a really interesting series of courses for you in time to come.

If you’d like to view the (anonymised) full set of survey results, click the link below:

Click to download the full survey

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