Colchester Young Farmers are a group of 16-26 year olds who meet once a week, often more, for meetings, tours, presentations, competitions and much more.

Every Young Farmers club picks a charity that they wish to support and raise money for throughout the year. For 2017-18, Colchester voted on two charities, one of which was RBST. Once this was decided, we arranged for Tom Blunt to come and give us a presentation about the charity, so that all of our members could understand where their hard fundraised money was going.
 

After this, we started organising our main charity fundraising events for the year. This began with a plant sale at Ardleigh Car boot. The club spent an evening planting produce such as beans and pumpkins before spending the next few months keeping them alive…some more successful than others! We then arranged to get a tractor to the car boot sale so that we could do a ‘how many balloons in the tractor’ competition, alongside the plant sale. Although the weather wasn’t great, we had a good turn out and a really fun day, even our cow mascot enjoyed himself!

Our second fundraising event was our first ever Tractor Run! This was such a huge event to organise, but our fundraising rep pulled it out of the bag. We had around 30 tractors turn up on the day, to travel in convoy around the local areas, with a prize going to the person with the most sponsorship. This was such a successful day and it was great to see so many people watching and waving from the road side! We all finished off at a local farm where a BBQ was ready and waiting for the hungry drivers. The raffle was also a huge success, and we even ended up auctioning off an out of date Pot Noodle for £30!! 

Our final event for the year was our Annual Harvest Supper, which was Casino themed this year! This event gives everyone the chance to get suited and booted in their black ties and ball gowns, which makes a change from the muddy wellies and Schoffels! The clubs parents and subscribers are all invited as well as the other clubs from Essex and the event sponsors, to have a 3 course meal with live music, a DJ, a raffle and of course an auction. The event was greatly attended and everyone enjoyed playing the mini roulette table centres between courses. 

CYFC are proud to have supported a charity that has so much relevance and importance to not just Young Farmers, but to all farmers and of course, rare breeds!

Erin Thomas, CYFC Secretary