Amy Luckhurst was enjoying the OE of a lifetime. She had been in the UK since June 2019, had seen the sights, taken a tour and was ready to start work at a rollercoaster park in England.
She had just completed her training when her dad got in touch.
“Dad said, ‘this covid thing is getting bad and you need to come home now.’ He bought me a ticket and I was out of there,” Luckhurst says.
Up until that phone call, she had little idea of just how serious things were becoming.
“The media in England wasn’t reporting covid correctly and were saying it was nothing more than a bad cold.
“I had no idea of the danger I was actually in.”
She had been in Stoke on Trent in West Midlands – the area was to become the first place in England to experience an outbreak.
“It was a hotspot and I had no idea. Thank goodness I had dad looking out for me.”
She is one of the lucky ones arriving home the day before NZ went into lockdown and a few days before mandatory quarantine kicked in.
But being back home with no job and income was not easy, so she began applying for jobs.
At one point she was completing 50 applications per day. She felt the four years she spent at university completing a Bachelor in Science majoring in botany and minoring in physical geography was worthless.
“I felt like somehow I had been irresponsible about everything I had done, even though I had basically followed the playbook the Government sets out. It was really disheartening to think the system doesn’t work,” she says.
Although a Bachelor of Science is a useful tool in agriculture, she had never considered farming.
“It wasn’t even on my radar, it was so far away from what I saw myself doing.”
But an advert on television caught her attention and she found Agri Training on the internet.
“I was like, you know what, maybe that might be an idea. I love plants, so maybe I could get into growing or harvesting. And I like driving and I’ve got heavy machinery experience because I did rollercoaster operating when I was in the UK.”
She took the punt and registered her interest and received information about an upcoming webinar event. The webinars ran over two days and it was a crash course introducing agriculture, talking about the lifestyle, what was on offer and covering basic health and safety.
There were 300 people that registered interest for the webinar and 30 were selected for a practical training course that ran over two weeks.
“I was one of those 30; it was really heartening after all the rejection,” she says.
Launching straight into practical skill training, on the second day the trainees were taught how to ride a motorbike.
“I was terrified, I’d only ridden one once and had crashed into a tree stump. But you wouldn’t know now. In fact, my boss has warned me to slow down when I’m out on the quad on the farm.”
Trainees have since learnt to drive tractors, fencing, studied stockyards and drafting systems, visit a sheep milking farm, talk to sharemilkers and plant trees.
“There was a huge variety of agriculturally-related experiences jammed into the two weeks,” she says.
“It wasn’t just showing us the nice parts of farming, we literally dug holes and built part of a fence on one of the trainer’s farms and that was really cool.”
Health and safety was covered, so the trainees learnt the potential risks and were taught basic first aid skills.
“They basically gave us a toolkit to start working on a farm, but because every farm is different, they couldn’t give us a book of exactly what we needed to do. They gave us a vague introduction to almost everything, I really enjoyed it,” she says.
Many of her class have landed jobs across the sector.
A former ship captain became involved in health and safety and now helps train others on the course. Others have landed roles on orchards, sheep and beef farms and several secured positions on high country stations.
Before the practical training, Luckhurst told her tutor she would be interested in anything but dairy. But the course changed her mind and before the end of the two weeks she was offered a position on a dairy farm 10 minutes out of Leeston with Tony and Eleanor Williams.
“They took us for interviews on some dairy farms that were looking for staff. I walked away with a job offer and a planned start date. It was an incredible feeling. Especially to happen so quickly after so much waiting to hear back from all the job applications I had submitted,” she said.
She started in the middle of calving but the team eased her into it, exposing her to different elements of the farm system and working out what she was good at and what she needed to work on.
“I was chucked in the deep end, but I was high on life. It was such a good feeling having something to do and being useful,” she says.
My first stint was seven days in a row, then I had three days off and I struggled to sleep in because I was so keen and happy.”
She is loving the lifestyle; the farm is 363 hectares and milks 1430 cows through a 70-bail rotary. There is a lot of technology on the farm and she enjoys learning all aspects of the job.
“We’ve got the perfect amount of cows for the perfect amount of grass and the irrigation system seems to have the right amount of water – and we’ve got the right consents for it all,” she says.
“It’s really incredible how complicated it all is, but I’m loving all the learning.”
Prior to starting work on the farm, she had known how important farming is and how much we rely on it, but had no idea how much work goes on behind the farm gate.
“I was ignorant; I was very green orientated before I started working on a farm. I used to believe a lot of the bad propaganda you see in the media, but once you work on a farm you realise it’s only certain people that are ruining it for the rest,” she says.
And overall, they actually do a really good job and are environmentally aware.”
She has begun a farming apprenticeship through Primary ITO and does not imagine leaving farming any time soon, she is very thankful to have found her place.
