Agriculture

The Agriculture gallery is divided into three themed sections.

The first area tells the story of agriculture through superb scale models and landscape dioramas. Students can also see a working demonstration involving four tractors.

The second bay is filled with lots of farm tools – including ones that have unusual names, like 'clod crusher'!

The final bay contains a diorama sequence which tells the story of the working life of an arable farm as the seasons unfold. It also features an original Ferguson tractor, and a cut-away combine harvester with moving parts that can be operated by hand.

The gallery uses real objects and beautiful dioramas (mini reconstructions) to show different farming tools and the jobs that they do – beginning with early ploughs and other soil working machinery, continuing with seed drills, and finishing with crop collecting machinery.

Children can use the displays to think about improvements that have been made in the methods and machinery used to grow and harvest crops.

The displays can also be used to explore how the various jobs on a farm are carried out during specific seasons.

Questions you could ask:

Autumn

1. What can be used to pull a plough?

2. What does a plough do?

3. Why are fields ploughed?

4. What are the oldest ploughs made from? Why do you think this is?

Spring

1. How did people used to sow seed?

2. How is it easier and better today?

Summer

1. In the past, what did reapers do?

2. In the past what did a thresher do?

3. Today, on the combine harvester describe what the gatherer does…what the threshing drum does… and what the elevator does.

4. How many different mechanisms can you see on the combine harvester (conveyor belt, Archimedes screw, pulleys and belts)?

Winter

1. What jobs can you see being done?

2. Why are these jobs done in winter?

Following their museum visit, children can:

1. Be thinking about the combine harvester: use sets of cogged wheels to investigate the effects of combining wheels with different numbers of cogs on them. A similar activity can be carried out with pulleys and belts.

2. Research farming methods around the world today and compare them with the methods they learned about in the Agriculture gallery. They will discover that machinery and methods have become automated and more efficient in the western world, with developing countries often continuing to use traditional technology.

3. Create a farm of the future incorporating developments that they think will be useful. They can consider the environmental impact of using fertilisers and fuel burning machinery, and think of alternative methods. For instance, children may choose to use robots for jobs that people do today.