8 Aussie teachers and students explain their passion for agriculture
AG’S future leaders, and the teachers preparing them for the job, define the direction of the industry, writes CAMILLE SMITH.
THEY may be in Year 4 now, but the next generation of agriculture leaders are already forming ideas about the importance of the industry, sustainable production, innovative technology and support services needed to propel agriculture and rural communities into the future.
Here, teachers and students explain why they are passionate about agriculture, why it deserves more prominence in schools and what needs to be done to improve education about the industry.
ROCCO RYAN, 9
Year 4, St Paul’s Anglican Grammar
IF ROCCO Ryan represents the future of Australian agriculture, the nation is in good hands.
The nine-year-old from Drouin West breeds black Australorps and has been competing in shows across the country since he was seven.
The pinnacle of his career so far is winning Junior Champion in the Australorp National Titles at last year’s Royal Canberra Poultry Show.
“The judges look for green sheen, tight feathering, and a flat back for a hen,” says Rocco, explaining the ideal attributes that make for a winning chicken.
The trick, he says, is to breed strong animals together to produce even better offspring.
“I was looking up stuff about chooks and just found out what to do,” he says. “If you have really good birds, the traits go through to the next hatching.
“And if one has something that another chook doesn’t have, you can breed them together.”
A sound grasp of genetic principles, for a Year 4 student.
Rocco has been smitten with chickens since he was six.
“I really loved animals and wanted something in my backyard,” says Rocco, who attends St Paul’s Anglican Grammar at Warragul. “I thought chooks were small and feathery and soft. I thought they were just adorable.”
He started with about 25 tiny chicks, and has grown his flock.
It’s not just continuous cuddles, Rocco is responsible for all the hands-on husbandry work, too.
“You have to spend a lot of time feeding, cleaning pens, incubating,” Rocco says. “To incubate eggs, they need hot water and warm temperatures, in case some of them hatch.”
Feeding birds “heaps of greens”, such as silver beet, is one way to encourage the green sheen on black feathers that judges look for in Australorps, Rocco says.
With a flock of “more than 50, easy”, Rocco plans to take 12 birds to this year’s Canberra show in June. Hard work aside, Rocco still rates cuddles as one of the best perks of the job.
“When they are baby chicks you can handle them,” he says. “They feel nice and fuzzy.”
LOUISE LEIGHTON
Teacher, St Paul’s Anglican Grammar
PART-TIME teacher Louise Leighton is passionate about showing kids where their food comes from and making sure they understand how growing produce is linked to the health of Australian families and communities.
Louise is in charge of the kitchen garden program at St Paul’s Anglican Grammar School’s Warragul campus. Rocco Ryan is one of her enthusiastic Year 4 students.
Louise and her students have been busy this month, harvesting fruit and veg for the annual Warragul Kids’ Farmers Market, held on March 22.
Children from schools across West Gippsland took part, growing produce, making value-added products, setting up and running their own market stalls.
Helping organise the event is just one way Louise extends her young students and the kitchen garden curriculum.
Originally planted 10 years ago with help from a Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden grant, St Paul’s garden at the Warragul campus has 12 established trees — fig, persimmon, plum, apricot and citrus — as well as seven raised beds for vegetable production.
Louise teaches Year 3 and 4 students once a week, with half propagating and caring for crops for a semester, while the other half learn to cook with the harvested ingredients. The children swap roles halfway through the year, with the kitchen group heading into the garden and the gardeners cooking.
“We have cucumbers coming out our ears at the moment,” Louise says. “Just having recipes they can do at home, it fills my heart when someone says I went home and made tzatziki three times.”
Louise’s background is not agriculture, but health. However, by teaching horticulture skills, she hopes children will see the bigger picture about how crucial farming communities are for the health of the nation.
“I hope to do more starting from scratch, with the students germinating seeds, growing them into seedlings, then planting them out,” Louise says.
Louise says the Stephanie Alexander Garden program provides brilliant lesson plans to help teachers.
“There is almost too much information,” she says. “You can link it to science, to maths. I link it to health.”
GARDEN GURU
MORE than 800 schools across Australia run kitchen garden programs, set up with support from the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation.
Founded by the iconic Melbourne restaurateur, the charity aims to introduce pleasurable food education to primary kids.
The program is designed for Years 3 to 7. Students spend a minimum of 45 minutes a week working in a vegetable and fruit garden that they help design, build and maintain on school grounds according to organic gardening principles.
The foundation offers teaching resources to link activities in the garden with curriculum across subject areas, primarily health and nutrition, but also agriculture, science, maths and humanities.
Originally piloted at Collingwood College in Melbourne in 2001, the program was officially launched in 2004.
It is funded in part by philanthropic donations and government support.
This month, federal Labor made an election commitment to restore $6 million in federal funding to the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation.
“The Kitchen Garden Program is a carefully designed model that, with investment from government, has the ability to transform the obesogenic environment for families in every community in Australia,” Ms Alexander says.
ABBEY BAILEY, 16
Year 11, Methodist Ladies’ College
SHE hasn’t finished high school yet, but Abbey Bailey already has plans to educate the next generation about the industry close to her heart.
“I would love to educate students in ag,” says the 16-year-old, who is a boarder at Methodist Ladies’ College in Melbourne.
“There are so many reasons ag is important for our country’s future.”
The Year 11 student comes from a livestock and cropping farm near Cootamundra, NSW. In addition to teaching ag, she also hopes to raise awareness about the importance of mental health in rural communities.
“In rural towns, I feel as if there’s a real mentality of everyone knows everything about everyone, and it can be real scarring for a lot of people when their private matters get out,” Abbey says. “There’s a lot of stigma around mental health issues and I feel more support is needed, especially with farmers having such high stress and long working hours.”
Abbey says boarding in the city opened many new opportunities, but also made her realise how important the agriculture industry is in her life.
“I only really started to think about doing something in the farming industry in Year 9, after I moved to Melbourne and I realised how much I appreciate everything about the country,” she says.
Abbey says the time she spent on MLC’s Marshmead farm campus in East Gippsland planted ideas about farming’s role in environmental management.
“While I already knew about farming, there was more in regards to sustainability and how global warming and climate change effect the farming industry,” Abbey says. “I think it also taught the city kids more about how to appreciate organic farmers.”
CLEAN GREEN
YEAR 9 girls at Methodist Ladies’ College have the opportunity to spend a term on the school’s 114-hectare Marshmead campus in East Gippsland’s Croajingolong National Park.
The campus includes a working farm and the ethos is sustainability. All buildings at Marshmead are off-grid. Students are in charge of adjusting their house’s solar panels, learning about water recycling, managing the property’s compost system and looking after calves, chooks and the vegetable garden. Independence and resilience are encouraged.
It is a new environment for many urban students. Rural boarders have the chance to share expertise and expand their knowledge about sustainability.
MATT DICKINSON
Teacher, Ballarat Grammar
BALLARAT Grammar agriculture teacher Matt Dickinson says teaching Year 10-12 students on the school’s 50-hectare farm campus satisfies his own personal interest in the industry.
With a Lowline cattle stud, Corriedale sheep flock, pigs, alpacas and chooks, it is a busy operation.
However, Matt says more statewide support of agriculture education could keep kids interested between Years 4 and 10. That period from the end of kitchen garden programs to the start of electives is light on ag-related programs, he says.
“As a group, the agriculture core teachers have been talking about this issue for a while,” says Matt, who has been an ag teacher for 14 years.
“There is no great support for schools to get involved in ag from an industry perspective … no centre of excellence. But there are a lot of dedicated teachers working hard to promote ag.
“Unfortunately the industry is broken up into smaller sectors. And we need them to all work together. It wouldn’t take much in terms of funding to really promote ag in a positive way.”
Matt puts in his best effort at Ballarat Grammar, where students receive theory and hands-on experience.
“We do a bit of cropping, have an apple orchard, a lucerne paddock where we cut our own hay,” Matt says. “Overlaying the whole thing is a strong environmental and community focus. We have planted over 2500 trees in developing the farm, have a large area put over to wetland and are really low chemical users.
“Ballarat Grammar has really built a niche doing this,” he says. “That is why I’m so supported by the school because they can see it is such a drawcard.
“We are just providing opportunity and encouraging these kids.”
ELLIE SINCLAIR, 15
Year 10, Ballarat Grammar
IT WAS only after she left her family’s 1200-hectare sheep and cattle property to go to boarding school that Year 10 boarder Ellie Sinclair started to appreciate how important agriculture was in her life.
The 15-year-old from Cathkin, near Alexandra, is a boarder at Ballarat Grammar. She is leaving her career options open by taking many subjects, but has really found her groove in agriculture on the Mount Rowan farm campus.
“When I started, I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to be,” says Ellie, who joined the boarding house in Year 7.
“But I realised how much I loved the farm and that is what sparked my interest in it. Missing it.
“When I heard that you could study ag in Year 10 and that we had a school farm, that sparked my interest, too.”
Although she still has several years of secondary school to go, Ellie’s early plans are to do work placement on cattle properties in Queensland or the Northern Territory before studying at Marcus Oldham in Geelong.
She says she sees the value in pursuing higher education in agriculture, even though she has grown up on a farm.
“I feel like I’m learning about new areas that no one is very knowledgeable in,” she says. “I’m doing a project on RSPCA chicken meat standards and that is something I wouldn’t have learnt at home.
“It is the variety in what you learn. It has opened my eyes to other industries.”
Ellie has a particular interest in cattle, as opposed to her family’s strong focus on sheep.
She is looking forward to showing the school’s heifers and choosing stud rams for upcoming shows.
ETHAN NOBLE, 17
Year 11, Arnold West
ETHAN Noble has his heart set on an ag career in renewable energy.
The Year 11 Bendigo Senior Secondary College student helped his family future-proof their farm in the face of crippling energy bills by adding solar power to the multi-enterprise property at Arnold West.
The Nobles are also building an off-grid dairy that they say will be a first in Australia.
Inspired by what his family has achieved, Ethan wants a career in the electrical engineering field to help agricultural businesses harness solar and wind power.
However, choosing secondary school subjects to help him reach his goal hasn’t been easy, Ethan says.
“It made me sad,” he says, explaining the courses offered at schools in his area do not cover engineering subjects in relation to agriculture, nor renewable energy.
This is no fault of teachers — the curriculum simply doesn’t exist, he says.
“I’m going to try to complete VCE, which will allow me to get better, especially with electrical terms,” Ethan says. “I might see if I could go for a course or degree in that area if I can, but I’m not entirely sure at the moment.”
Ethan’s mum, Carly, says career counsellors explained renewable energy is covered in the third year of a uni engineering degree. But even then, she says, ag applications may not be covered.
“That was annoying,” Carly says. “We sat down with a careers teacher, but even she was stumped about the area he wanted to go into.”
The lack of courses spurred Carly to campaign for change in Victoria’s agriculture curriculum, particularly in regional public secondary schools.
“Finding the right course for Ethan to pursue has not been straightforward,” she says. “That is where I was frustrated with the industry.”
PUSH FOR CURRICULUM CHANGE
CARLY Noble is on a mission to effect change. She wants Victoria to follow the lead of NSW, where agriculture technology is part of the mandatory curriculum for all Year 7 and 8 students.
She has campaigned, in writing, for industry organisations to become more involved in agriculture curriculum design and implementation of courses at public schools across regional Victoria. Her aim: for agriculture to be an elective subject available in all Victorian secondary schools.
In response to Carly’s letter, Minister for Education James Merlino wrote back saying the VCE agriculture curriculum has been updated with input from the VFF and Horticulture Innovation, and that food and fibre production is part of design and technologies curriculum for all Foundation to Year 8 students.
However, Carly insists even more industry involvement is needed. “If we all sat at the table and worked together as a united front we would pull up the most amazing ag course,” she says.
CECILIA OPPENHEIMER and JAMES BELL
Agriculture teachers, Geelong Grammar
YOUTH and experience make a dynamic ag teaching team at Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop campus.
Cecilia Oppenheimer, 25, and James Bell, 40, deliver agriculture curriculum to Year 9s, who spend a year on the school’s property near Mansfield, where they have the opportunity to gain experience on a 240-hectare farm.
Agriculture is optional, but Cecilia says most of the Timbertop students choose to take it, spending three hours in the classroom and two hours doing hands-on farm work every fortnight.
“Igniting a little passion for ag in Year 9s is what I’m trying to encourage,” says Cecilia, who grew up on a Merino property in northern NSW.
“Often I say it doesn’t matter if you are sitting in a fancy office with a white shirt on, you still might be working in the ag industry in some form.”
It is Cecilia’s first year teaching agriculture and her third as an English teacher at Geelong Grammar. James has been an ag teacher for more than a decade and grew up on a cropping and prime lamb property in NSW.
Holistic farm management is his guiding principle in the classroom and in the paddock. He explains the framework teaches students that every decision on a farm must consider environmental concerns, social needs and economic factors — “for a farm business to be sustainable or regenerative it needs to satisfy those three areas,” he says.
“Gabe Brown probably explains it the best,” James says, quoting the regenerative farmer and author from North Dakota who writes, “Why would we want to sustain a degraded resource?”. James agrees.
“We have the opportunity to improve it,” he says. “You could say the same for rural communities.
“I think there is huge opportunity for kids who study ag … it combines a lot of content areas into a career.”
TIFFANY MILLER, 23
Agriculture student, University of Melbourne
TIFFANY Miller is part of an army of urban young people pursuing tertiary degrees in agriculture, hoping to gain a foothold in the industry.
The 23-year-old from the Mornington Peninsula grew up in the beach suburb of Rye. She had little exposure to farm life before taking an ag elective in secondary school.
After she graduated, she was uncertain about where to gain practical skills, so spent two years working for Australia Post.
“Then Melbourne changed their degree and it was a lot more hands-on,” Tiffany says. “They offered second year, second semester at Dookie campus, so I jumped on board and I immediately realised I really enjoyed it.”
The university’s Dookie campus is a 2000-hectare working farm in the Goulburn Valley, where students experience everything from soil science to meat classing competitions.
Now in her third year of a Bachelor of Agriculture degree, Tiffany loves every aspect of life at Dookie.
She is not alone. Since the university rehashed its Bachelor of Ag program in 2015, dwindling enrolments have reversed. Over the past three years, about 200 students have enrolled each year, and 50 per cent are from the city.
Initially, Bachelor of ag students had the option to live on campus at Dookie during their second year. However, students enjoyed the experience so much, they campaigned to stay longer.
“We preferred to stay at Dookie,” Tiffany says, “so we fought really hard … and wore the faculty down to let us come back.”
Now students have the option of completing second semester of third year at Dookie as well. Tiffany is in her final semester, with a job lined up.
GENAZZANO STUDENTS ADD TECH TOUCH TO RELIGIOUS STUDIES
From the editor
MORE needs to be done to excite young people — particularly rural youth — about the huge opportunities in food and fibre, writes CAMILLE SMITH.
Tail to tell in ConnectED mag
COOTAMUNDRA teen Abbey Bailey is spreading the word about the importance of agriculture. Read Abbey’s story in ConnectED, the magazine that puts agriculture education and rural students on the agenda.