Community & Business
6 December, 2024
Picasso, a cow, and the little school that could
MILLAA Millaa State School proved their artistic credentials when they won the nation-wide Semester 2 Picasso Cows competition with a judges score of 100 per cent.
Competing against 51 other schools, the students’ winning entry, a life-size cow named Holly the Holstein, also attracted $2000 as prize money and a fast-tracked education in dairy farming.
For the past 15 years, Dairy Australia has been running the Picasso Cows Program to teach students about the Australian dairy industry.
For the Semester 2 program, students learned about dairy products and their health and nutritional benefits, farming practices, and manufacturing processes, all while decorating a life-size fibreglass cow.
The Millaa Millaa students also created a Picasso Cows learning journal which documented and showcased their engagement with their chosen theme, “Farm to Plate”.
They developed design ideas from dung beetles to digital cow collars, road signs, ear tags and dairy farm locations, and received great feedback from the judges.
The students said their entry aimed to acknowledge the local industry in the Millaa Millaa area - the cow’s name, Holly the Holstein, was a favourite character from a book based on local dairy farmers Colin and Shelley Daley. The students had experienced dairy production at Mungali, where they had learned how to churn butter (and sampled some dairy delights).
“Dairying has been so much a part of the history of this area, we felt this needed to be one of the main features in our design,” they explained at their celebratory school assembly.
“You will see the map of the Millaa Millaa area incorporated into our design and [you can] look more closely at Holly to see the locations of the dairy farms - shown through a symbol.
“We have used prints of paddock grasses to decorate Holly’s body and we also looked at the different birds that live with our dairy cows. Egrets help rid the cows of ticks and the little fire tail finches are the small birds often seen darting in and out of the paddock grasses.”
And, of course, the students made sure Holly’s feet were suitably clad for the very wet Millaa Millaa climate by the addition of styled up gum boots.
