A tiny school in western NSW has made a small fortune from its first wheat crop | Hacker News Reader

A tiny school in western NSW has made a small fortune from its first wheat crop

abc.net.au

32 pointsGaishan9 comments

Anyone can make $50000 from wheat if they get free land, free labor, and free machinery.

Also, $50000 for 7 students for "most of the year", assuming 7 months, is about $1000 per student per month. They'd make more working at McDonalds.

And 170t out of 85ha does not sound extraordinary.

Per the article: "Seven students from kindergarten to Year 6 attend Hermidale Public School". That would put the oldest kids at around 10 or 11 years old.

It's fair to say that they would have difficulties as a commercial farming operation, but for a bunch of little kids trying to fund a trip to the beach it's quite a good result. I think we can forgive them needing a bit of assistance to get their harvest in.

Having a quick look at the map, Hermidale to Sydney is about ~600km / 373 miles, or an ~8 hour drive each way, so this has been quite a good fund-raiser in that regard.

> They'd make more working at McDonalds.

I would imagine that, aside from the difficulties in hiring children so young, they would lose quite a bit of money on travel - the McDonalds map puts the nearest restaurant at Dubbo, which is a ~2h20m drive each way from Hermadale.

People are often surprised at how large Australia is.

Apparently "header" is another term for harvester in Australia, in case anyone else wondered.

Could somebody help me understand which part of the process was handled by the students? From what I can tell prepping, planting and harvesting at the scale of 85ha would be done with giant machines?

I could have missed it, but it looks like the work was done by community volunteers. I didn’t see anything specific that the kids did other than learn about the process.

Here's an idea: land-grant elementary and high schools in the US :-)

Or a tradition of donating land to schools, likely with the requirement that it not be sold, rather the rent used to fund the school

In Oregon we did that with forests dedicated to the support of schools. But forest harvest has been significantly handicapped (and on the Elliott halted all together) by environmental activists/litigators.

The latter sounds quite inefficient, with the problem (already present in the current system) of school funding being tied to the wealth of the neighbourhood.

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