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Industry Partners of Gateways 4 Sustainable CORRECTED VERSION EDUCATION AND TRAINING COMMITTEE Inquiry into agricultural education and training in Victoria Pyramid Hill — 2 November 2011 Members Mr P. Crisp Mr D. Southwick Mr N. Elasmar Ms G. Tierney Ms E. Miller Chair: Mr D. Southwick Deputy Chair: Ms G. Tierney Staff Executive Officer: Ms K. Riseley Research Officers: Ms A. Madden, Ms M. Scott Administration Officer: Ms N. Tyler Witnesses Ms M. Eicher, Saluté Oliva Pty Ltd; Mr R. Moon, owner, mixed farming enterprise; Mr P. Ford, Chief Executive Officer, Gardiner Foundation; Ms J. Nelson, Executive Officer, North Central Local Learning and Employment Network; and Mr J. Mazzarella, Principal, Pyramid Hill College. 2 November 2011 Education and Training Committee 1 The CHAIR — Thank you for appearing before the committee today. A few of you have heard what I have said, but unfortunately I need to keep saying it for the purpose of Hansard. As you know, we are taking evidence today as part of the Education and Training Committee’s review of agricultural education and training. The evidence that you provide us today will be covered by what we call parliamentary privilege, so anything you say today will be covered, just as members of Parliament are covered during their parliamentary activities within the Parliament. However, that privilege does not apply outside of this room. Feel free to say whatever you like within these four walls. Hansard is recording all of your evidence, and that is the reason these microphones are in front of you. You will get the opportunity to have a look at a draft of the transcript of these proceedings and, if there are any errors, you will have the opportunity to correct them. Thank you again for appearing before the committee. We will begin with any opening comments you would like to make, otherwise we will get straight into the questions. Mr FORD — My opening remarks would be that dairy is a large, complex and exciting industry. It is $13 billion a year in value, and 75 per cent of that is in Victoria. There are 3500 dairy farmers. They are really agile people who are responding to things like drought, flood, changes in price and things like that. There are 140 processing sites in Victoria. They are producing over 1 million tonnes of exports and are quite an important sort of economy. The Gardiner Foundation has funds in trust and we invest about $6 million a year. Some of that is in better grass, better cows and less energy in the factories. It is about human nutrition and things like that. Zeroing down to the investment in community and people, that is about $1 million a year of investment in the community, people and issues in the dairy industry. There are two key drivers of the dairy industry which drive our investment in Gateways. Of the 60 000 people who work in the dairy industry in Australia, 40 000 are living in small communities of less than 5000 people. That is like the four communities we are talking about here. Making sure that those small communities are vibrant is a defining issue for dairy, because if you do not have people staying in those small communities — living in them and contributing to them — the industry will not have labour for the farms and factories. Another key demographic for us is the fact that since 2008 the Australian workforce has been shrinking. For the last 60 years we have had a high birth rate, migration and things like that, but it has started to shrink, and so dairy is in competition with mining and tourism and things like that for the talented people in the workforce. The magic words for us have been attracting, retaining and developing talented staff. Gardiner Foundation has a proud history of projects such as Cows Create Careers, which is putting calves in schools at year 8 or year 9 to attract kids to the industry. Projects like Gateways are a pathway to vocational training in agriculture and dairy, scholarships, mentoring and leadership programs, including rural community-based leadership programs and things like that. We invested $250 000 or thereabouts, in the Gateways project. It is one of those projects where we have got in, funded it in the early stages and have tried to stay in there long enough to make sure that it has had time to build up, the models have been worked out and it has got a bit of a track record. We are thinking it is pretty close to that sort of stage now. Typically with those other projects that we have talked about, at some stage we have to decide to pull out and move on to something else. We see lots of good things in Gateways — all the students you have seen today. In addition to things that have not been discussed today, Cohuna school won a government prize for the best science and maths program, which we think is significant. The community has a say in the curriculum for these sort of programs, which we think is really important. The way that the community and the individuals in the community and the industry come together in a program like Gateways is also a really important part of the program. For the dairy industry having vibrant small communities, talented people and Gateways as part of a development program for life is pretty important. Ms EICHER — I might just take it from there. What I find is so interesting in Gateways for these kids is that they are taken out of their own community. Even though we are so close together, the agriculture side of it is quite varied. Pyramid Hill and Cohuna are very dairy based, whereas Boort has virtually no dairy at all — it is basically broadacre farming, sheep and horticulture. The irrigation there has been utilised for that. I think it is a great opportunity for those kids who have grown up in one area seeing their way of farming to move not that far and learn about other sides of farming that might attract them more. They might get something out of it and say, 2 November 2011 Education and Training Committee 2 ‘We could adopt that here. We could have a small side part of the farm that could become that’. I think it opens the mind to what farming is. It is not just what we see at the doorstep. Mr MOON — Just for your interest more than anything else, I will give you a bit on my background. I am a farmer — almost third generation here — and my son is a vet, just come home to the farm. I am fairly involved in the community and have been involved in the school council for quite a number of years. My involvement in the Gateways project probably started quite a bit before it was established. It is trying to build agriculture into something to be recognised as a career opportunity. I know when I went through school agriculture was not my first choice of career by any means; I just ended up there. I have enjoyed it immensely and got a lot out of it. My passion for this was sparked because I had a son and all he wanted to be was a farmer, but at that stage it was talked down. People said to him, ‘Why do you want to be a farmer? There is no future in that’, et cetera. That came as a fair concern to me. There were a couple of others on the school council experiencing the same thing. We tried to get agriculture into the program, as you heard Joe speak about before. Some of that started a bit before Joe’s time. He came in to really feed off some of the predecessors. When you ask why industry gets involved in this, I will say I am very selfish about it and that that is why I got involved in it. I have a real interest in it. My eldest son was one of the first ones prior to the Gateways program, and he and his cohort of students were some of the ones who designed the orchard that you had a look at before. From there we built up, and I worked with Joe for a little while. We took four kids who were very much disengaged with school — well, I will not say they were disengaged, just that they struggled with some of their schooling outcomes — and they had a bit of a flair for agriculture, so we set up a land program. We actually took it from paddock to plate. This was back in about 2006, so it was before a lot of these in-vogue things were here. They actually came out to my place and had a look at some different types of lamb and sheep. They had to go and assess their feeding requirements, nutrient requirements and marketing requirements before they even started, and then we actually brought some lambs into the school and fed them through. Out of that I saw that those kids had to do their maths; they had to sit down and calculate; they had to go out and engage with the community when working with the local butcher shop and work out how best to market it and what weight does he want. All of a sudden the kids who were struggling with school started to engage. It built up from that, and the chairs from the Titanic started to line up and as a few started to get into different meetings Gateways was founded.
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