Friday, March 29, 2024

PULPIT: Contest is really a talent quest

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The 2019 FMG Young Farmer of the Year grand final was the most tech and innovation-driven contest to date.  The gruelling three-day event in Hawke’s Bay tested competitors’ fencing and machinery skills but also challenged their tech-savviness, critical business thinking and asked how they would market food and innovate for the future. 
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The focus on technology and agri-business skills has some farmers asking what’s happened to slugging it out with more traditional farming tasks and why contestants spend so much time on technical modules in a farming competition.

For people asking these questions I think it’s important to think about why the contest still exists and what it’s trying to achieve in 2019 and beyond.

Young Farmers membership is becoming increasingly diverse with clubs no longer being just on-farm workers but also agronomists, genetics experts, rural bankers, agricultural contractors and many other professions that make farming possible.

To compete in the national grand final these young people first have to get through a series of qualifying events in their regions, where basic, manual farming skills such as fencing, chainsawing, motorbike use, sheep shearing and even correctly fitting saddles and covers onto horses are tested.

But many of these manual skills are not always relevant in such a diverse contest. 

What use is fitting a horse saddle for a fruit grower? 

How proficient does a dairy farmer really need to be at shearing a sheep? 

Should a beekeeper have expert fencing skills if their business is one focused on breeding elite honey bees and exporting food products from New Zealand around the world?

That’s when it becomes important to look at the bigger picture, to think about what the competition is there to do and to think about what the future holds for people who are competing in this modern era of agriculture.

The competition exists to build the capability and skills of young people interested in rural NZ. It exists to find, cultivate and challenge the agri-food sector’s leaders of tomorrow. 

The competitors are mostly in their 20s. They’re at the start of their careers in an industry that is more diverse than ever, facing more rapid change than ever before. 

What will agriculture look like in the year 2040 when today’s winners will be aged only in their 40s?

There are already plenty of farms in NZ that use robots to milk cows or drones to muster their sheep. 

Halter, an innovative kiwi company, aims to make physical fences a thing of the past, instead using GPS-guided cow collars. 

Driverless tractors and robotic fruit harvesters are on the verge of going mainstream.

The farmers of 2040 will need to be able to instantly adapt to technology to survive. 

The agricultural leaders of tomorrow will need to constantly innovate and run profitable businesses better than anyone before them. 

They’ll need to understand the rapidly-changing values of consumers and need forward-thinking ideas for how we will sell our premium produce to the rest of the world.

That’s why it doesn’t matter any more whether the winner is a dairy farmer, a fruit grower or a young professional working for Fonterra with aspirations to learn skills outside of the farm gate before coming back to the land.

What matters is that our industry is finding these young, smart people and challenging them to grow their skills and knowledge so they can be our farming leaders of the future.

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