Last year’s top graduate Claire Douglas also won the DairyNZ Student of the Year award.
“She was an outstanding student,” Horner says.
“Claire is a natural leader and her whole attitude and the way she conducts herself – she is a manager in the making.”
Douglas did not come from a farming background but always loved the outdoors.
She took rural studies for two years at school and found a job relief milking near Patumahoe. The farm owner put her onto Taratahi so she left high school to attend the two-year residential programme at the Wairarapa campus.
Her second year studies focused on dairy.
Students live together at the residential campus in Wairarapa and work alongside each other on the farm.
“That tight-knit, family approach made it easier to be out in the real world,” Claire says.
“It was the first time I had lived away from home, away from my parents for the first time. It was a really nice community. Everyone felt like a big team.”
People and communication skills were one of the biggest life lessons she took from her time at Taratahi.
“That’s also where most of my practical skills came from,” she says.
After completing her studies at Taratahi she found work as dairy assistant on a 270-cow farm in the Central Hawke’s Bay.
But she was soon looking for the next step up and was open to going back to study.
“I felt like I needed to do more study. I wanted to go out and push myself and get the diploma and I had the heart to go back studying.”
She heard about the CNIDA when she visited the National Fieldays and applied.
The academy is funded by Theland Farm Group, part of Shanghai Pengxin and run by Taratahi. It is a highly sought-after diploma-level development programme designed for people who want to become a farm manager within five years.
It’s an intensive, 37-week residential programme combining theory, practical training and on-farm experience based around the Massey University agriculture diploma.
“The theoretical side of it was so in-depth, it was a massive step up. We never just sat down in class and wrote notes off the board. It was always a discussion. The way Dave taught was really different. You were actively participating in it all the time, always thinking. Everyone had an opinion,” Douglas says.
She is now 2IC on one of the Theland’s properties near Reporoa. The 320ha farm milks 860 cows and employs a manager, 2IC and three farm assistants.
Horner says the CNIDA programme is truly unique.
“It’s the most amazing learning experience.
“Students have access to seven large corporate farms with over 12,500 cows.
“This means we are using a huge, real-time dataset to compare and contrast impacts in animal welfare and milk production and all the contributing factors to this.
“And we have similar access in the South Island, making it a truly national open-air classroom.”
Taratahi, established in 1919, is New Zealand’s largest agricultural training provider. In 2017 it acquired the similar sized Telford campus in Balclutha, which had been providing agricultural training for over 50 years.
Taratahi provides levels three to five vocational agricultural education from 55 sites nationally. And Taratahi’s levels two and three programmes are also running in more than 150 schools nationwide, creating a path for future students interested in a career in primary industries.
“Vocational education and designing new pathways into the primary industries are essential,” Graves says.
“The sector is changing very quickly with expensive new technologies and equipment, a much higher reliance on data and on scientific knowledge to inform decisions about how to use resources.
“There is an acute shortage of people with the right skills coming into the industry so we all need to work together to create both pre-employment and on-job training and education that is easily accessible and highly relevant to the industry.”
