Hawke’s Bay student Izy Greville from Woodford House said “I found it really beneficial, especially the sessions on networking and building an impressive curriculum vitae.
“Those are skills which are extremely relevant as most of us try to line-up part-time jobs during the school holidays.”
The course, Raising the Standards, is run by Young Farmers’ engagement team and is funded by DairyNZ.
Students learned about cadetships, overcoming pressure, dealing with conflict, interview techniques and budgeting.
“Many didn’t realise there are jobs in the banking sector which involve working solely with agri-business clients,” Young Farmers school engagement manager Mary Blain said.
Speakers included a banker, vet, viticulturist, a technical field representative and the sustainability manager for a large dairy farming business.
The group visited Bostock NZ’s organic apple orchard and the Mr Apple pack house.
“Going inside the apple pack house where the fruit was graded and sorted was an eye-opening experience,” Greville said.
“It was a huge, highly-automated operation involving lots of technology and science.”
Greville was one of four Hawke’s Bay students on the course. She was joined by Kaylee Hutchinson, Annabel Bowen and Emma Dunderdale.
“The pack house was fascinating and not what I was expecting. Each apple is photographed by high-tech machinery to check for bruising.”
Mr Apple’s pack house is fitted with multi-million-dollar sorting equipment and an automatic defect grader.
The technology takes 240 photos of every apple in a split second to assess its external and internal quality.
It means the machine snaps about 640,000 photos of apples a minute, stopping defect fruit from being exported.
“The field trip opened my mind to the wide variety of jobs in the horticulture sector, which I was previously unaware of,” Dunderdale said.
The 16-year-old lives on a sheep farm at Onga Onga and chairs the Central Hawke’s Bay College TeenAg club.
The year 12 student is considering studying agricultural science or veterinary technology at Massey University.
“I like animals and science.
“I think studying agricultural science will keep my options open to a larger number of job opportunities once I’ve graduated,” she said.
