Rural delivery: Farmers ignored wake-up call on staff shortages

By CLIVE DALTON*

The Global Dairy Company will work only if about 30,000 alarm clocks go off every morning, and those woken go and get the cows in.

It's never been a job with much status, and for that reason and many others, we're now experiencing a crisis in dairy farm staffing.

It was predictable as soon as herd sizes started to increase, and long before dairying's expansion in the South Island.

Action to address this problem should have started 10 years ago, and been fast-tracked five years ago, but the buck landed nowhere.

The Dairy Board, dairy companies, Federated Farmers, teaching institutions and many dairy farmers all agreed that trouble was looming but felt they could do nothing on their own to fix it.

The natural reaction now is to look for someone to blame. Farmers who have hundreds (often thousands) of cows to milk this season, and who cannot get reliable, trained staff, will be phoning educators asking for their top students, and looking for revenge if let down.

Who is accountable? You can start with parents who didn't produce enough children 16-19 years ago.

Then there are high-school careers advisers who farmers believe put students off farming by saying it is a job for low-achievers. Those I have talked to are very keen to promote farming, but they cannot force students into careers or break down well-established prejudices.



Perceptive young minds also pick up negative images from television ads or news items showing unkempt farmers driving grubby utes.

Farming discussions are characterised by seemingly endless boring talk about mergers and the weather. Young folk see a male-dominated industry, when in fact dairy farms would not survive without an almost-unrecognised female input. Yet there are few women dairy company directors, and, to a 16-year-old, the industry appears run by dull old men in suits.

The dairy industry is the world's most sophisticated health-food industry, and it's time those looking for staff started advertising for milk-harvesting technicians, not farm labourers or milkers.



You can be blamed for the employment situation for just talking about it. I've been told to shut up about poor employers, and to talk about the vast majority of good ones. My experience suggests there are an awful lot of people in this minority of poor employers!

Many of the so-called good employers offer abysmal contracts to 16-year-olds, such as one weekend off a month, and provide your own bike! Genuinely good employers never have a staff shortage.

The costs of fulltime education can also be blamed for staff shortages. These have increased in recent years with no corresponding rise in industry scholarships. Helping out young entrants to the industry has always been a job for someone else. Extra pay for qualifications has been rare, too.

Then there are the farmers themselves, which is where most of the blame should be laid. For decades, maybe longer, too many farmers have bad-mouthed their industry.

I've met hundreds of young people at careers evenings whose farming parents have advised them to get a trade instead. These young people have had a much bigger effect in deterring their peers from the industry than any careers teacher.

A common response to a Massey University study of school students' attitudes to farming was, "Farming sucks!" Who can fix this? Only farmers can.

* Dr Clive Dalton is a former farming tutor at Waikato Polytechnic.