Agriculture opportunities for students in the NSW Northern Rivers video

Nathan:

Hi, my name's Nathan Kempshall and I'm the Senior Project Officer here at Department of Primary Industries on the North Coast. We're here at the Wollongbar Institute and I'm here with Michael Beaumont, the Farm Manager. Can you tell me a bit about what you do, Michael?

Michael:

Yes. We're here at Wollongbar Institute. It's 102 hectares. We've also got three other farms with Pierce's Creek, Duck Creek, and the Tropical Fruit Farm, where we research horticulture from macadamias, blueberries, as well as pecans and passion fruit. We come back up here. We're researching cattle, pasture, tea tree.

Nathan:

Yeah. Great and you've got yourself, you've got two school based trainees here, and there's three trainees over at Alstonville. What do they do in their day and what things are they learning?

Michael:

Yep. They're learning to run a real operational farm, day to day operations, as well as liaise with researchers and any projects that come up. There's a project at the moment happening, the Launch Paddock. You probably could talk a little bit about that.

Nathan:

Yeah. That's one of the projects that I'm working on, currently. It's an Education and Career Pathways Program, where we basically are looking to educate and inspire kids from kindergarten right through to university. We'll have school excursion programs on the site, which utilises our amazing assets and the projects that we have.

Nathan:

We have a Work Placement Program, which is for the students that are studying Ag or Primary Industries at school and they've got to do their work hours. That program's really great, because they get to have a snapshot of Primary Industries as a whole on this site. They get to work with you on the maca farm. They also get to spend some time with the researchers around soil and water, so it’s a real snapshot for them, as to all the opportunities that they can move into as a career.

Michael:

Yeah, definitely Nathan. Primary Industries have a big thing to offer up in this area.

End of transcript.