FOR AUSTRALIAN agriculture to compete with fast-growing global competition, it will need to be highly innovative.
That message was delivered loud and clear at the 2016 Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences Outlook conference in Canberra last week.
While part of that innovation will be driven by farmers themselves, part will come from the world of agricultural science.
So the low numbers of university students lining up for agricultural degrees is a concern.
That shortage of tertiary skill, while not at crisis point, was already limiting agricultural enterprises, according to the Dean of Agriculture at The University of Queensland Professor Neal Menzies.
Companies recruiting for agronomists for years was not unheard of, he said.
A keynote speaker at the conference, Prof Menzies said Australian farming would need to be competitive in the sense of having a better product as much as in the sense of being low-cost and efficient.
All the sort of things that make our produce more competitive - from new varieties of grain to more environmentally-friendly fertiliser - will come from the ag science community, he said.
“We need more bright minds in the future working to make agriculture competitive,” he said.
“We would be better to grow our own talent rather than rely on that imported from overseas.”
Australian universities produce 800 agriculture graduates each year at the same time 4000 jobs requiring a tertiary qualification in the field are advertised.
Ag science salaries rate among the higher end of the professional pay spectrum and the jobs on offer come with a full host of ‘wants’ in the professional career stakes - from travel opportunities and flexibility to the ability to ‘make a difference’.
So why are school leavers bypassing the discipline?
Prof Menzies believes it is an image problem.
Australian universities, he said, were ranked above world standards for agriculture degrees.
As research institutions, they also sit high up the rankings.
“Our ag teaching intuitions are some of the best in the world, we have plenty of well-qualified staff, there are far more jobs than we produce graduates and salaries are good and increasing,” he said.
“Yet we are not churning out enough agriculture graduates to meet industry requirements.”
Young people looking at university as the next step towards a career associated farming with catastrophe - it was all floods and droughts, bankruptcy and farmer suicides, Prof Menzies said.
“Compare that to the resource sector, which is saying: ‘here we are, the guys who will change the world’,” he said.
“We need to remake ag’s image.”
Meanwhile, the top-end skill shortage in agriculture was also put under the spotlight at the ABARES conference.
Rural social researcher Dr Neil Barr, La Trobe University, believes the shortage has as much to do with retention issues as it does recruitment.
He said declining numbers of young farmers was a major point of contention in the bush.
Young farmers were much more likely than mid-career farmers to be employed as managers, he said.
And young farmer managers were five times more likely to exit agriculture than owner/operators.
The young farmer debate was not so much about the productivity of agriculture or it’s performance as it was about the future of rural communities, he said.
Since 1976 the number of farmers under 35 has declined by 75 per cent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Dr Barr presented figures that showed that while 61 per cent of that decline was attributed to farm aggregation, 21pc had occurred due to education taking a greater proportion of youth.
However, Australia actually had a very high percentage of young farmers, at 14pc, compared to other countries.
The US is 5pc and Japan 3pc, for example.
“And if you adjust our farmer median age to take account of the amount each farm produces the median age falls by up to 10 years,” Dr Barr said.
He did place a caveat on the data, however, by pointing out it was collected up until 2011, during the peak of Australia’s mining boom.
“The latest figures, due out in 18 months, may amend the picture,” he said.
“But the message is that just looking at the top-end skills shortage in terms of recruitment misses the other side of the phenomenon.”
ABS figures show the level of tertiary education in agriculture for the past 30 years has been less than half that in overall society.
Prof Menzie said it was the same story when you look at the figures for TAFE qualifications or completion of year 12.
Succession planning specialist Isobel Knight said the focus in agriculture had been on productivity for so long that the view ‘we can be successful without being educated if we are productive’ was ingrained.
“We might be performing well in the productivity area but in other areas - marketing, financial analysis, communication, training and development, strategic planning - we are performing poorly,” she said.
“However, many farmers have spent a fortune educating their children.
“We need to bring those young people back into ag.”
