Insight: The young guns taking the non-traditional path into agriculture
They’re overseeing portfolios, speculating and hedging but these rising stars didn’t take a traditional path to get a job in agriculture. Now, they’re thriving.
Barney Swan fondly remembers the weekends he spent squashed between his brothers Jock and Sam in the back seat of his dad’s ute, ambling around their northern NSW farm.
With notepads on their knees, and calculators in hand, in between typical brotherly shenanigans, the boys diligently recorded the numbers of calves marked or sheep crutched that day, unwittingly learning the core lessons of successful farming, handed down through five generations.
Barney loved the maths, and spotting the emerging trends and data patterns, and he dreamt of a career in finance or law.
When Barney finished school, he packed his bags for the bright lights of London, perhaps destined for Canary Wharf or even New York’s Wall St, but fast forward a decade and today, the 28-year-old has achieved that dream career much closer to home, in agriculture.
When we speak, he’s in a coffee shop overlooking Sydney Harbour, the battered notepad replaced by a sophisticated lap-top as he crunches numbers, analyses export markets and decides whether or not it’s the right time to buy trims or cube roll.
“I’ve got friends who work in the money markets and we sit around the dinner table talking about what we do, and our jobs are not dissimilar,” says Swan, the Australian Beef Group’s national sales and marketing manager. “We are overseeing portfolios, taking risks, speculating, hedging, and taking positions, the only difference is I’m working with livestock and crops.”
Despite the hugely diverse careers that agriculture offers, both on and off farm, school leavers are not following in the likes of Swan’s footsteps.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ most-recent Census data, Australia’s agriculture workforce is shrinking and the pipeline of young Australians pursuing careers in ag barely a trickle.
Experts believe the problem lies in a lack of awareness among young Australians about the diverse, hi-tech, innovative, and lucrative career opportunities that exist with modern agriculture and say the industry needs to urgently rally to stem the talent tide.
“The Australian agriculture industry has undergone a transformation in the past few decades, but there’s a lack of understanding of what ag is, particularly at school level,” says Carissa Buckland, director of corporate affairs and marketing at Nutrien Ag Solutions.
“We are an industry that is highly innovative, we invest in technology, we are highly reliant on data and data analysts, and we really value people and sustainability. Not only is it one of the most noble pursuits in terms of feeding the world, agriculture today offers a really rewarding, hi-tech, global career that isn’t just on farm, that is supporting or part of the larger supply chain.”
CALL TO ARMS
The Australian agricultural sector is worth $94.3 billion to the economy and according to the CSIRO the sector currently employs 228,000 workers directly on-farm and more than 1.5 million Australians in careers that support the supply chain.
But, in November last year, the Victorian Skills Authority warned that the state faces losing up to 35 per cent of its current on-farm workforce in the coming years, with poor prospects of renewing the talent pipeline due to a perception that agriculture is ‘hard, dirty, labouring job with no future’.
Nationally, the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry forecasts agriculture to have the lowest workforce growth rate of all industry sectors while the Australian Bureau of Statistics says that “a downward trend in absolute numbers (of the Australian agricultural workforce) appears to be entrenched”. These grim forecasts foreshadow big problems for our sovereign capability, food security and export industries.
But perhaps most alarmingly, young Australian school leavers are not even considering a future in agriculture.
Despite a record number of students enrolled with higher education providers, 1.6 million in 2023, just 5208 of them chose agriculture, environment and related Studies, a decrease of 13 per cent from the previous year.
Perhaps this is hardly surprising when the National Farmers’ Federation reports that 96 per cent of high school students do not receive any formal education in agriculture.
“We need to shift the image of what modern agriculture is, and highlight the rich and diverse career pathways agriculture offers,” says Luciano Mesiti,chief executive of the Primary Industries Education Foundation Australia.
“There’s an old-fashioned view that farming is tough, poorly paid and you need to move to the country to get a job, all of which is really wrong. We know that a large amount of ag work happens once the product leaves the farmgate, and that story is not being told.”
“Ag tech, tech development, sustainability and managing climate change are a big part of the industry and we have careers advisers who have no idea about this and how vital these roles are going forward.
“For every person who finishes a TAFE or University course, there’s six jobs available in ag in Australia. There’s so many opportunities and many jobs going unfilled.
“We need to engage with students at a much-earlier age, with structured programs that tell kids where their food and fibre comes from. This education needs to continue right throughout their schooling, and we need careers teachers to promote careers in ag.”
BREAKING THE MOULD
It’s a balmy summer evening in southwest NSW, and after a day spent in her airconditioned tractor, cleaning silt out of dams, Hannah Bamford, 31, has just arrived back at the homestead she shares with her partner.
“We’ve done two dams today, one more to go tomorrow,” she says, with a satisfied grin, happy to tick the task off her to-do list.
Last November, Bamford was offered her ‘dream job’ as the assistant manager of the 4000-hectare property near Young, one of the perks of which was rent-free residence in the sprawling station homestead.
Growing up a ‘townie’, at beachside Tannum Sands near Gladstone in Queensland, and having never stepped foot on a farm in her childhood, a career in agriculture, much less managing a multimillion dollar cattle and cropping enterprise, was never on Hannah’s radar.
After leaving school “directionless” she took jobs packing pallets, and driving trucks and earthmoving equipment, before spotting an ad to work on patrol boats with Australian Border Force.
Drawn to the ocean and the idea of job that kept her active and not glued to a desk, she loved keeping a lookout for illegal arrivals and criminal activity on the high-seas. But, after a few years of the month-on boat, month-off cycle, she craved a more settled life with her partner and new Kelpie pup, Doug, at their home at Holbrook NSW. It was here that a chance meeting changed the course of her life.
“I needed to get Doug vaccinated but I was out on the boat at the time. The local vet said ‘I’ll vaccinate him now but you’ll have to come in and sign the paperwork when you get back’. When I got home I visited the vet and he was intrigued by my career and asked me lots of questions, we got chatting about all the things I’d done, and he asked if I’d be interested in giving him a hand while I was on shore leave.
“I jumped at the chance. My mum was a wildlife carer and I’ve always loved animals, I’d thought about being a vet when I was at school but studying and school wasn’t really my thing. On my first day, he took me to a farm to help preg-test Angus cattle, 500 of them!’ she laughs.
“I’d never done anything like it, but it was amazing and I loved working with the cows. I was blown away by what can be achieved with genetics and AI (artificial insemination), and I was totally hooked that day. Working with the animals was so exciting and I made the decision not to go back on the boats.”
With the diverse skill set she’d developed over the years, and a keen interest in learning more about agriculture, Bamford reached out to local farmers and offered herself for contract work, taking any and every job available. Her first contract job was helping a farmer sow 4000 hectares of crops.
“I learnt so much from the farmers, and they were always happy to teach me. I got quite good at calving down, and weaning and weighing, and people like the way I worked. Word spread and work came in. I’ve been very successful, more than I ever imagined.”
In 2022, her efforts were rewarded with an Angus Foundation scholarship to attend the Angus NSW committee’s prestigious, Tocal Beef Assessment Course.
Today, not only is she overseeing a burgeoning cattle station, but she has built her own ag labour-force business, Ag Work Solutions, connecting contractors like her to farmers in need. Bamford owns a home at Nelson Bay NSW and is working towards purchasing a farm of her own.
“I’ve done a lot of stuff in a short time,” she says, “I’ve had no formal training, I didn’t go to uni and I don’t have any trade certificates, but I’ve ticked off all of the things on my bucket list because ag is so diverse, and you don’t have to be getting your hands dirty on the farm, ag offers everything. Everything we touch, eat or do is related to ag in some way, it’s an incredibly satisfying industry to work in.
“I never dreamt this sort of career was something available to me,” she says, “when I was at school no one spoke to us about jobs like this, agriculture offers so many diverse and really interesting jobs that pay well.”
VISION SPLENDID
In recent years, television shows such as Netflix’s Territory and the ABC’s Outback Ringer have burst onto our screens, all dust and dirt, and swashbuckling cowboys battling it out with greedy cattle barons. With cinematic scenery and colourful characters, they’ve attracted huge audiences; Territory recorded six-million downloads in its debut week.
But, arguably these shows have cemented a clichéd idea that agriculture is a desolate, high-risk and dangerous occupation.
Taking a hand-on approach to reframing the way we look at ag, and plugging the talent shortfall, Nutrien has partnered with PIEFA to develop a suite of eye-catching, free resources for primary and secondary schools to better engage with students, but also to inspire teachers to teach about where Australia’s food and fibre comes from, and the huge array of careers on offer in the agriculture industry.
It’s a personal passion for PIEFA boss Mesiti, who grew up on a farm and is a former ag teacher. He says there are still barriers to getting young people engaged in agriculture and agribusiness, and is lobbying to ensure agriculture is a compulsory part of the curriculum.
“Kids need to be exposed to modern world of ag from a young age, rather than seeing the image of an older farmer in a drought affected paddock, they should be seeing someone using a drone to manage their crops or developing a GPS to better understand soil nutrition. We need a lot more good news stories about what we are achieving in Australian agriculture and we need to shake the tree and ensure government and industry are listening.”
“Even though we have an Australian curriculum, each state has a different approach to how ag is taught, and how much focus or attention is given to future careers in ag. We need schools to incorporate teaching about food, fibre and agriculture into everyday lessons, but one the issues is that we don’t have enough ag teachers, and if we don’t have high quality teachers teaching ag content, often the subject gets removed from school program or we end up with the music teacher or English teacher, not trained in ag, teaching those subjects.”
Nutrien’s Buckland believes there is a golden opportunity to entice students from the popular STEM courses, like IT, engineering, natural and physical sciences towards using their skills in ag.
“We think there is a massive and untapped opportunity to embed agriculture as part of the curriculum across STEM subjects to ensure that all students, not just those who study ag specifically or go to an ag college, have the opportunity to learn about ag as part of the STEM framework, because it’s a highly science related career, and their skills are very transferable.
“We are in a race for talent up against the likes of the mining and finance industries, and we want students to know that they can pick agriculture as the first choice for their career and they will have a really fulfilling, well-paid, global career.”
KICKING GOALS
Growing up in Scotland, Jake Eaglesham never dreamt he’d spend his days flying drones for a living, let alone piloting them across some of Australia’s most beautiful country.
“I showed a mate what I do and he said, ‘its just like playing Play Station’, and I laughed because that’s so true,” says Eaglesham, taking a break from using a drone to spray a paddock thick with blackberry, at Adjungbilly, in the Riverina region.
“This area is quite steep with a lot of trees and the farmer can’t get a boom spray over it. To do it by handgun is very labour intensive and inefficient but with two drones we can get it done in 12-14 hours and we can be very precise with the spraying which is much better for the environment.”
The lush foothills of the Snowy Mountains are a long way from the Scottish Highlands where Jake was born and raised, but it’s here you’ll find the former professional rugby player navigating his fleet of hi-tech drones to spray weeds, manage water assets, aerial seed or fertilise, or even map paddocks and crops.
For Eaglesham, who left school at 15 and worked on oil rigs in the North Sea, it was by chance more so than design that he found himself running a successful ag-tech business in southern Australia.
“Agriculture wasn’t an education path when I was growing up, and there weren’t a lot of opportunities unless you’d grown up on a farm, so it wasn’t something I’d ever considered,” he says.
Eaglesham came to Australia to play rugby and fell in love with Wagga Wagga and a farmer’s daughter named Tess, who lived there. Tess’ father and brother had a spray contracting business with small units on the back of their LandCruiser utes, they’d go around the region spot-spraying in their spare time, while running the family farm. As demand grew, they were finding it more difficult to juggle the needs of the farm and a growing business, enter the plucky Scot who was eager to impress his in-law, and willing to roll his sleeves up and have a go.
In 2023, his brother-in-law, Jack, invested in a drone and from that day their business changed, in one afternoon he completed a spraying job that would normally take four-five days.
“The drone work was so good because I’m not from a farming background, but I could use the drone and it meant I could help out and be useful without having to pick up a thousand lambs for marking,” Eaglesham laughs.
It also allowed him more time to spend working in the gin distillery he runs with Tess, Riverina Gin.
Today, their business AgriDrone, provides spraying services and sells drones to farmers keen to improve their efficiency. It is estimated that around 300,000 drones are in operation in agriculture globally, working 500 million hectares of farmland in every corner of the world. Jake says that from the first day he used one, he was amazed by how efficient, and how much fun the drones are to use.
“It’s so much fun! It’s like flying model planes when we were kids, but by far, my favourite part of the job is the places we go to, it’s a million-dollar, birds-eye view every day. We get to see some sunrises that people would pay a fortune for and we are so lucky that this is our office every day.”
“You can do a four-day training course in drones and get your certificate and instantly there’s job opportunities.”
OPPORTUNITIES KNOCK
Despite growing up on a farm, it took time away for Barney Swan to see the diverse business opportunities that agriculture offered. After returning from London, he studied law at the University of New England, taking on various jobs, but ironically, his lucky break came during a visit home.
He bumped in to an old family friend who was running the local meat processor, and was invited to visit the sprawling plant on the outskirts of town.
“I had lived about 10 minutes away from this place for most of my life and really had no idea about what the business did. I knew we ate meat and loved it, but from the time our cattle left the farm, I had very little insight of how it ended up in the supermarket or the process of getting it to plate and I had no idea how big the company was, they have offices in China and all around the world.
“I joined their graduate program and moved home for a year, it was life-changing, I followed the supply chain, starting in the feedlot, working in the boning room, then the shipping, logistics sustainability and business teams,” he says.
Today, Swan is passionate about educating young kids about the diverse careers on offer in ag, and believes the industry and educators are not doing enough to highlight what jobs are out there.
“For what it produces and how big the industry is, its managed by a relatively small number of people. People in ag are modest and humble, they don’t go out and self-promote their jobs and careers, what they’ve achieved and how much they earn. Maybe it’s time we did? We need to see more of the positive.”
Monster 4.4 million-hectare pastoral empire to hit the market
Macquarie is poised to sell its mammoth Paraway Pastoral Company portfolio, which could field multibillion-dollar offers from foreign wealth funds and Aussie red-meat giants.
How the ban on Chinese deals for US farmland could affect Australia
The US has placed new restrictions on Chinese buyers of their farmland, but could this push investors toward Australian farms instead?