Dairy farmers set to milk overseas skills with new visa deal

There is no shortage of Irish voices on the Kilpatricks’ dairy farm in western Victoria near Warrnambool.

Oonagh Kilpatrick on her dairy farm near Warrnambool with worker from Ireland on 457 visa Daniel Curtin

There is no shortage of lilting Irish voices on the Kilpatricks’ sprawling dairy farm in western Victoria near Warrnambool.

Besides owners Oonagh and Harper Kilpatrick, two of their five workers are Irish, soon to be joined by an Irish farm manager.

It’s not at all how Ms Kilpatrick envisaged it would be when the Irish couple quit high-powered fin­ance jobs in Saudi Arabia and, in a bold adventure, switched a small family farm in Northern Ireland for 500ha of flat, fertile dairy country at Koroit.

“We thought it would be easy to find good skilled staff because we are so close to Warrnambool and in the middle of a big dairy region, but it has always been a struggle,” Ms Kilpatrick said.

“We hadn’t realised there was this reluctance by many Australians to work on dairy farms and the lack of knowledge about the cows, the dairy industry and how much it has to offer — a good proportion of the people who applied to work here just didn’t have the necessary skills or commitment.”

With more than 800 cows to milk around the clock, 1300 cows calving every year and a 50-stall rotary dairy supplying the nearby Murray Goulburn butter and milk factory at Koroit, the Kilpatricks need at least five workers — often in the cold, early hours of a winter morning — to help run their multi-million-dollar business.

Too often they have had to rely on holidaying foreign backpackers, who are not allowed to work for more than six months. “We just get them trained and then they have to leave,” Ms Kilpatrick said.

They have even invited agricultural students and graduates of Irish farming colleges to try their luck in Australia.

The Kilpatricks are not alone in their frustration.

As Australia’s farms amalgamate and get bigger, more than two-thirds of the 6300 remaining dairy farms employ workers other than family — up from 30 per cent a decade ago.

According to Dairy Australia surveys, each dairy farm on average employs between two and five staff, nearly 25,000 employees are engaged in dairy farm work, and 80 per cent of farmers struggle to find suitably skilled workers.

That is why Dairy Australia’s policy manager Claire Miller is ­delighted to have sealed a trailblazing deal with the federal Immi­gration Department to allow experienced foreign dairy-farm workers to enter Australia on 457 (skilled work) visas. Overseas farm workers previously were ineligible for 457 visas because the jobs were not recognised by the government as requiring skills, an anomaly Ms Miller yesterday said needed to be fixed urgently.

“There is a desperate shortage of skilled and experienced farmhands for jobs we can’t fill locally; now we have this template agreement in place with recognition this is a skilled position it should be much easier for dairy farmers to hire experienced farmhands from overseas on 457s,” she said.

“But this is no open door to any worker; the farmers will need to demonstrate that for six months they have made every effort first to fill the job locally,” she said. An overseas application will need ­either five years’ recent dairy-farm experience or three years’ experience and a TAFE-style qualification in agriculture.

Such a farmhand can work up to four years on a 457 visa on the sponsoring farm, must be employed under award conditions, and be paid a minimum skilled-worker salary of $53,900 a year.

The Kilpatricks already employ Irish metalworker Daniel Curtin, 31, on a 457 visa, since metal fabricators were eligible for 457 visas long before dairy hands. Now they are thrilled to be able to seek similarly eager, experienced farm staff from overseas.