Australian Agricultural Centre receives grant to launch Youth Ag Activation Project

Based in Crookwell, the Centre received the grant as part of ANZ and the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal's Seeds of Renewal Program.

Jo Marshall from the Australian Agricultural Centre said the idea for the Youth Ag Activation Project came about in response to what she described as an "unsuccessful" gap year program launched by the Federal Government.

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Ms Marshall believed the biggest limitation of the program was farmers being turned off hiring "green" students fresh out of high school due to the time and resources it took to train them.

"We want to provide some soft skills in areas such as fencing, animal handling, chemical handling, critical thinking and some general farm skills to our youth," she said.

"Even rural and regional kids might not have been on a farm and may need [skills] but the farmer might not have the time [to teach them] and that might discourage them from taking on that help because we know how time poor farmers are."

The grant has funded two week-long sessions of the Youth Ag Activation Project to be held in 2023. The first will be for local school children and the second for anyone aged between 16 and 20 interested in learning more about agriculture.

Provided the pilot is a success, Ms Marshall said she hoped to apply for further funding to continue to deliver the program in the coming years.

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A series of taster days held earlier this year at the Australian Agricultural Centre received positive feedback from students.

Ms Marshall said one female student from Sydney, who had just come along to support a friend, finished the day having sheered three sheep, "I've learned more today than I've learned in 13 years of school", the student told her.

"That's the difference you can get with practical education and that's what the Agricultural Centre is designed to do, it's trying to entice the next generation to choose [agriculture]," Ms Marshall said.

According to Ms Marshall, the agricultural industry is currently facing a marketing crisis, between floods and droughts, she said the media painted a negative picture of the industry.

"When you have negative stories on the news it's really hard to provide a good brand that entices and provides a louder voice above the negative," she said.

"So I think it's important that we start to work on how we talk about pathways and what life is like in agriculture."

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Although a traditional view of agriculture depicts farming as a profession handed through generations of a family, Ms Marshall said there was an increasing need for new people to enter the industry.

"The agricultural industry or agribusiness has grown enormously and it covers a vast range of occupations," she said.

Ms Marshall hoped the Youth Activation Ag Program would give students the basic skills and practical experience to develop an interest in the industry and to understand what the pathway into agriculture looked like.

"Rather than going and trying it [on a gap year], they've taken an initial first step by doing a small amount of training which has given them that taster rather than turning up green," she said.

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