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@Kushyzee more from that month

Field practical training started today Today has been a very crazy day for me, it started fun but it quickly got tiring at one point and I felt like collapsing. My classmates and I started our outstation field practical training today (FPT) at a very big farm, where we are meant to be working and getting field experience for 3 weeks. Field practical training (FPT) is similar to industrial training (IT), it's like the IT version for agricultural students. Unlike the normal IT, our FPT entails us all going together and working on a farm. We rented an apartment close to the farm (not exactly) and we are meant to be reporting to the farm every day latest 7am. We all arrived at the apartment yesterday and we briefly visited the farm, where we were introduced to the farm manager. The farm has 3 major units; fisheries, poultry, and the feed mill. The manager gave us a brief introduction of how we will be doing things on the farm for the 3 weeks duration.

The first thing he said is that we are to report to the farm as early as 7am and then we will close by 5pm (ouch! 🤕). He then added that we will be shared into 2 groups; the first group will work in the fisheries and feed mill units, while the other group will work in the poultry unit, and then we will swap after a week. After a while, we left and went to our apartment to settle down and get ready for today. Everyone woke up as early as 4am and we started getting ready, we left at about 6am and arrived at the farm 30 minutes earlier (yeah we came early 😁). The manager arrived after a while and he told his assistant to give us a tour of the farm. The assistant is the one in charge of the fisheries and feed mill units so that's exactly where he concentrated on. He took us first to the feed mill unit and explained how the various machine works, then he said we shouldn't worry much about the theories because we will see it in action.

Then next he took us to the fisheries unit, which is where it starts to get interesting. In one of the ponds, there were some really big fishes which he told us were actually hybrids of two different species. He said some of them weigh as high as 13kg! I am sure some people here can't even lift it 😂 I tried taking pictures of them but it was clear enough because the water was reflecting light.

Then next he took us to some ponds which he called the ocean pond, one of the ponds has 20,000 fish while the other has 25,000, that's way more than the combined number of fishes we have at my department's fish farm. He said in all day, the fishes in one of those ponds can eat up to 30 bags of feed, I was shocked at this point, that is a lot! The ones we have back at the farm can't even finish one bag in a day.

After the tour, we grouped ourselves into two and assembled before the manager, then he said the first group will be in the fisheries and feed mill department this week, while the other will be in the poultry, I fell into the first group 😆 We went to the feed mill first and started working immediately. We made feed for the chickens on the farm which was quite interesting. We crushed some bags of maize in a machine called crusher, and then we mixed it with wheat offal, protein concentrates, and ironically; limestone (regular cement used for building houses).

After the ingredients has been mixed, the whole thing came out from the other end and we packaged it in bags after weighing it to make sure there are 25kg. It was very strenuous and in the end, we packaged 64 bags of feed. My classmates were complaining that it was too much work, and the assistant manager told us that they packaged 360 bags the previous day, and there were only two of them 😆

After making the feed, one of my classmates bought yogurt, mince pie, and some doughnuts. We had a little bit of rest then we went over to the fisheries unit, where we cleaned some ponds and then removed excess sand from it, it was very stressful and really strenuous, that was the last thing we did before closing for the day. I got home later at about 6pm and right now my body is telling me that I am going to have lots of body aches tomorrow 😆 but the funny thing is that this is just the first day, so I just have to get used to the work and hope the 3 weeks come quickly so I can end this 😴 **Thanks for reading 💖💖💖** **Wednesday January 5th, 2022**

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