Messing with the model

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Extracted from the Farm Tender weekly Newsletter - Sign up and get the email every Wednesday morning before 5 am. www.farmtender.com.au

By Dwain Duxson

At our Farm Tender staff meeting each Tuesday morning on zoom, we have questions each time, we go around the room, and everyone has their turn to answer. All the staff members get a turn at hosting the meeting, and it's their responsibility to come up with the question.

Mike ran this week's meeting, and the question was: How would you attract young people to Agriculture?

The question is very topical, and it's an industry-wide thing that is starting to affect Agricultural output. It might just be the single thing that stops us from becoming a $100 billion industry by 2030.

There were some really good answers, but a couple of them stuck out.

Ellen, who's family is heavily involved in the Racing industry in Ballarat, said that the local Racing industry is desperate to attract stable hands and track riders as Trainers are struggling to get all horses trained each morning.

Now Ballarat Turf Club, in their wisdom, has created a new industry for the city/area. It's now a Horse Training mecca, with over 800 horses being trained out of there now. Like Agriculture, the Thoroughbred Horse industry requires people to do the work. Robotic riders don't cut it.

So traditionally, they start Training the Horses at 3 am (yes, I know you are thinking how cold it would be in a Ballarat winter). So Ellen, in her answer to the question, said, " for the Trainers to attract staff, why don't they start training the Horses at 7 am instead of 3 am and finish a bit later?" That would be more attractive for someone.

By doing this, it would be uprooting decades of tradition as to how Horses have been trained. But hey, the world has changed, and it might take a complete rethink of how things are done to get young people involved again. The left field stuff.

Kelsey said he read a book the other day where a group of Bakers had changed the working hours to attract new people to their business, and it worked. Baking is another industry that traditionally has start times of 2-3 am each morning, and after a while, those hours burn people out.

So the crux of those two answers for each of those two industries, Racing and Baking, is that for those industries to attract people, they have to make deep-rooted changes to tradition and how their industries operate.

So how does Agriculture change? We have the same problems as the Racing and Baking Industries.

A story about Farm Tender. 5 years ago, if we put a job ad out, we would get over 100 applicants. 2 years ago, that same job application only attracted 15 applicants. So we thought, to find more, and better applicants, we need to change something up. So we thought we would advertise a part-time position, and bingo, the applicants went back up over 100 again, and we got the staff member we craved.

We have had a bias toward full-time staff since we started the business 10 years ago. It was a limiting belief that we had to only employ full-time staff. Tip that on its head, and now we start getting the people we want again.

So how do we get people to work in Agriculture and on Farms? The statistics are against us in that we are an aging population, and there will soon be a diminishing number of young people entering the workforce. So this problem we have will gradually get worse.

Other industries will be able to digitise and automate. Agriculture deals in real things that require physical work. Our industry has limitations on how much it can be digitised and automated.

It might be about the way we do things. We might have to turn things on their head.

Perhaps we have to mess with the model.

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