The first 2019 Scholar report has been released!

"Attracting Youth into Agriculture. Developing a strategic framework to encourage young people to pursue a career in agriculture"

• Youth are the cohort that will provide solutions for future challenges facing agriculture, but youth are generally unaware of the diverse career opportunities offered.
• Lower than required numbers of youth pursuing post-16 studies in agriculture is an international concern.
• This report aims to provide a unique perspective on the current international issue of how to attract youth into agricultural careers.
• This project concentrates on providing 12-16-year-old students with multiple opportunities to encourage them to consider pursuing agriculture in their post-16 studies.
• There needs to be an alignment of all industry bodies to ensure a united and singular approach to attracting youth into agriculture.
• Dr Hlami Ngwenya of South Africa, coined the acronym PERFECT to highlight the full breadth of careers from creating agricultural policies to designing technologies for agricultural uses.
• In the UK, Professor Louise Archer and her team researched, analysed and then created the conceptual framework of Science Capital about what science youth know, how they think, what they do and who they know.
• Apply the Agricultural Capital framework to the current system in Tasmania to attract youth into pursuing agriculture in post-16 studies.

“The full spectrum of career prospects available in agriculture are not well understood and therefore not pursued, so we need to expose students to authentic agricultural experiences across both urban, regional and remote schools.”
 
“Through my travels I identified established and successful programs working to attract students into post-16 agricultural studies. However, like Australian-based programs, they are frequently implemented in isolation and not revisited during pivotal school years.