Prime Movers sector report: Workforce

By PHILIPPA STEVENSON

Shaun Wilson went blindly into a farming career. The teenager's rugby season was over, he liked the idea of working outside, and so he got a job milking cows near his hometown of Palmerston North.

Wilson was a townie.

His grandfather had been a Waikato sheep and beef farmer but his father, a business consultant, was disappointed with his job choice.

But the year Wilson went farming, 1984, was a turning point for the rural sector, with the arrival of the Lange Labour government's Rogernomics and the withdrawal of government subsidies on farm production.

"Everything fell apart in 1986," recalls Wilson, who was sent down the road with little more than some good advice. His former boss advised him to get a qualification.

Three years later, Wilson had a Massey University bachelor of agriculture degree and began a 14-year career managing large herd dairy farms.

Now living in the Waikato, Wilson has taken a break from working on farms to devote his time to encouraging a new generation of young people to choose a farming career.

He would like to "correct some of the problems I encountered" and enable today's school leavers to make a more informed choice.

Wilson is project manager for Cambridge-based ATR Solutions (the acronym stands for attract, train, retain) which recently won long-term dairy industry funding to expand its Window to Dairying seminar programme nationwide.

The one-day seminars, aimed at high school careers advisers and their students, have been run in the Waikato since 1997. This year they will be held in four regions, and eventually in 10 nationwide.

On the day, students talk to current farm workers of similar age. They are shown a range of skills and technologies they would use or need on a farm or in other jobs in the dairy industry, and they are told about education courses.

The approach to careers advisers as well as students is for good reason. "We don't think we are getting access to those [students] with the ability to be leaders in the future," Wilson said.

"Dairying is not just about milking cows. When you are managing a large number of staff there is no time to milk cows. A large part of your time is in the office dealing with consultants, financial advisers."

Wilson believes the low regard in which farm careers are generally held - described recently as "hours, cows, scours and low wages" - have arisen from people entering the industry who have not had their expectations met.

In other words, badmouthing by the disgruntled.

Farm worker and New Zealand Herald columnist Louisa Herd saw it another way. "Too many farmers treat their workers as labour units to be flogged to death through the season, then jettisoned like dead slaves."

The industry's inability to get and keep staff had "nothing to do with the fact the work is dirty, poorly paid and has antisocial hours. So does nursing. So do many retail jobs, maintenance jobs and a lot of public service occupations.

"The question is, are these professions haemorrhaging their workforce at the same rate as ours?"

Wilson does not believe farming is alone in its employment difficulties. "Like other industries, we have got problems," he said. "But now there is clearly more of a desire to do something about that than there has been at any time in the past."

So, what's being done?

Last year, a workshop was held in Rotorua to examine human resource issues in agriculture. After years of much talk but little action on agriculture's widely acknowledged and growing inability to attract and keep a range of workers, the event was something of a summit of the desperate.

The statistics were startling.

By 2030 the dairy industry was predicted to have four million cows - 9000 herds with an average 440 cows per herd. To manage that, it was forecast to need 8000 graduate farm managers, 250 consultants and 100 PhD level researchers.

Horticulture was expected to grow from a $2 billion industry to a $3.5 billion one by 2010. The labour force required to service summerfruit, pipfruit and grape-growing in Central Otago alone was predicted to be 4100 by 2005-06, up from 2800 in 2001-02.

Farmer employers were perceived to have poor employment relationship skills, the workshop heard. They quickly fired staff when things got tight, didn't subscribe to a "learning culture", were too busy to teach or mentor, expected staff to have the same commitment they did, and were poor promoters of their industry.

They also seemed to be slow learners. Massey University's Professor Stuart Morriss reminded the workshop of the 1963 Agricultural Development Conference, the 1970 Agricultural Training Conference, the 1985 Cameron report on agricultural training, the 1991 agricultural innovation conference, the 1993 agricultural industry summit conference, and the 2001 Greenprint conference. Each had addressed issues of the future human resource for the rural sector, but still the problem persisted.

The Rotorua workshop resolved to do better.

It requested that a pan-sector view be taken of the human resources issue. Chief executives of a range of industry organisations and government departments appointed a working group to develop a strategic human capability plan. The group was asked to concentrate on identifying current shortfalls and skills, and determining the long-term needs of the industry.

In March, the working group from the agriculture and horticulture industries said they had "joined forces to tackle the issue."

Participants in the project include Dexcel, Massey University, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Deer Industry NZ, VegFed, NZ Fruitgrowers Federation, AgResearch, Lincoln University, Federated Farmers, Agriculture Industry Training Organisation, Tertiary Education Commission, Meat NZ, New Zealand Wool Board, Department of Labour, Dairy Insight, and Meat and Wool Innovation.

The Ministry of Agriculture's Sustainable Farming Fund stumped up $500,000 to bankroll the group's work.

Working group chairman Richard Gardner said the initiative was "highly needed. The demographics are quite terrifying".

New Zealand as a whole had a shortage of young workers, but the need was particularly acute in the agricultural and horticultural sectors which, between them, accounted for more than half New Zealand's exports earnings and 17 per cent of GDP.

"At the same time we are changing the profile of the people we need. There is a lot more technology involved in bigger farms and bigger orchards. We need a management capability - people with human resource skills, not just physical ones."

It was also important to retain and build skills in science or there would be no one left to train the next generation.

"We could turn around twice and not know what we'd lost. It's a biggie. We need people right across the value chain."

Gardner's group aims to come up with a blueprint for attracting, educating and retaining people to the ag/hort sector by overseeing the range of events and training courses on offer, eliminating duplication and identifying where additional resources are needed.

Dexcel education strategy manager Miranda Hunter said the group aims to be "less talk, more do".

A lot of work was being done to co-ordinate existing initiatives; for instance, a range of industries had worked together at careers expos, rather than just one or two. The results had been promising.

Next month Dexcel planned to launch a range of human resource management tools in a kit that would go to farmers.

But, Hunter said, the problem was large and complex and the group was wary of raising farmers' expectations too soon.

"We don't want farmers to think, 'great, that's fixed it'. There's a long way to go yet."