Stereotyping the bush is a hiring hurdle but so is the data gap

Stereotypes about rural jobs need to change, but a lack of solid data is not helping in the search for more workers.

Belle Binder, Farm Work Loop.Photo: Supplied

Jen Galloway can’t easily quote a single figure when it comes to quantifying labour shortages in the bush, but the general manager at AgriFutures Australia is very clear about the problem.

“It’s a challenging one to answer, because the data is so disparate,” she says.

“We are quite fragmented in the way we collect data across the industry.

“But if you had a conversation with anyone across the whole supply chain, you would hear the same thing – that there are shortages, there are skill shortages and it’s hard to find people to work regionally.”

It’s the same story across the board, from people handling the sheep or picking the fruit to those doing payroll, grappling with IT systems or working in various businesses along the food supply chain.

Coming up with a solution is not just about changing perceptions of agricultural jobs – less mud, more high tech these days, for example – but about developing much better data sets about shortages in different sectors and regions.

For a host of reasons, including the fact that some workplace analysis has tended to ignore the bush because so much work is carried out by owners and their families, the data can be very inaccurate.

So much so that there is a concerted push from AgriFutures and several other agencies to get a handle on what’s really happening in labour markets outside the cities.

Which is good news to Belle Binder, a Tasmanian woman who runs a labour hire firm for fruit and horticulture workers. She says it’s hard to know whether the shortages are real or at least in part a result of poor employment methods and farm cultures.

Binder is one of several finalists in the AgriFutures Rural Women’s Awards, with the winner to be announced on August 20. Her Farm Work Loop is an effort to build better practices around the employment of backpackers, locals and those workers who come here under the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme.

Her company has about 250 workers on its books in high season, working on about 60 farms in northwestern Tasmania, and is about to expand to the mainland and to other agriculture-related industries such as chicken processing, fisheries and vineyards.

But finding seasonal or temporary workers is only one of the challenges for employers in rural and regional Australia.

There are ongoing shortages for permanent and professional workers, a reality that is driving organisations such as AgriFutures to work out how to collect reliable data as the first step in improving policies and recruitment approaches.

In April, AgriFutures released a report outlining a strategy to develop consistent data in a bid to understand workforce dynamics and navigate future gaps.

Jobs and Skills Australia is looking at food supply chain capacity. In an April discussion paper it argued that collection, dissemination and analysis of data in the sector was challenging because agriculture is “a heterogeneous and geographically dispersed industry”.

It said that data at the broad industry levels (often the most detailed available from national surveys) could sometimes fail to capture the labour market dynamics at play in particular sectors or regions.

Then there are the seasonal fluctuations in labour demand and the high reliance on temporary migration, both of which make it hard to capture numbers in official statistics such as the census.

Another problem is that recruitment in the bush is often by word-of-mouth or social media and thus vacancies are hard to track. But perhaps most surprisingly, it turns out that agriculture, forestry and fishing are excluded from the business labour surveys carried out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics because it’s been accepted globally that it is not really worth the cost of collection. That’s because hired labour is only a minor part of total labour input on farms.

Coming to grips with the data has also led the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry to look at better defining exactly which jobs we should be counting in the search for more rigorous information from the bush.

Knowing the numbers alone won’t solve the problem. Jen Galloway notes that a big hurdle to attracting workers is that so many people don’t understand the breadth of work available in rural and regional Australia. Changing attitudes is another focus of her work at AgriFutures, with research showing that “many community perceptions about working in rural industries are still based on stereotypes, such as having to live regionally or work in a paddock with livestock or crops.”

The annual Rural Women’s Awards are part of that effort to show a different side of the bush – and in the process demonstrate the great range of work that is possible.

Galloway says the awards celebrate women who make an impact in rural and regional areas, not necessarily by getting “dirt under their fingernails”.

Other finalists include the Northern Territory winner Tanya Egerton, who is setting up community-led op shops in remote Indigenous communities, and the West Australian winner Mandy Walker, who co-runs a diesel repair business but is working on helping businesses transition from fixing tractors to entering the defence supply chain.

The South Australian finalist is Nikki Atkinson, who is promoting the Merino wool industry through her sustainable wedding dress and special occasions brand; and in Queensland, Kate Lamason is the co-founder of Little Tuna, which produces canned tuna that is 100 per cent caught, owned and made here.

The Victorian finalist, Grace Larson, is helping address unfair health disadvantages faced by rural kids through The Sisterhood Project; and in NSW Rebecca Keeley has set up Yarn, a digital health platform that offers personalised speech and language content to help parents help their kids as they wait for specialised assistance – which can take time to arrive in remote areas.

Belle Binder’s employment work began with her purchase in 2020 of a small labour hire firm that managed hires and payments for local farmers in the northwest of the state.

She renamed it Left Field and reinvented the approach, eventually deciding that working closely with farmers and local communities to ensure they had a “large funnel of tested and productive workers” was the future. It’s a two-way street, she says, with workers assured of placements on farms with a positive culture.

About a third of the people on her books are people on holiday visas who are keen to blend “work, travel and community”. Another third are PALM workers and the remainder locals.

Jen Galloway says Binder is trying to “connect the experience that people are expecting with the experience that they get”.

Binder herself worries about what she calls a “scattergun” approach to hiring ag workers: “The traditional labour hire approach is we just throw a bunch of darts on the dartboard and some will stick and some won’t.”

She says some programs are not well managed and there is a lack of information for potential workers.

“If you have a look at the data, there’s certainly shortages and that needs addressing,” she says. “However, I do question whether it’s the way it’s being approached, rather than it being a problem, and that’s what I’d like to change. I’d like to change the perception of agriculture. I do think that’s contributing to the challenges..”