Unsung heroes under the soil
Much of the scientific work being carried out at the Massey University led regenerative agriculture project, Whenua Haumanu, is below the ground.
About 250 people attended the event this year – a record number according to Kemp.
"I think it reflects the excitement out in the ag industry these days and also the buy-in to the fact that we need more highly capable, smart employees in the sector. The industry is really voting by its feet with its support and we had no trouble attracting sponsors for these awards. There were twenty-seven sponsors here and when they were asked they all said yes," he says.
Kemp says ag student numbers at Massey this year are the highest they have ever been. He says this is part of an upward trend which has been occurring over the past five to six years. He says it's hard to pin-point why this is happening.
"I think it's partly macro economics. There are jobs in farming and there has been constant messaging by the wider industry including adverts on television. The whole media messaging is positive and somehow this has got into the wider community psyche," he says.
Rural News winners use drone to great effect
The Rural News sponsored award for the best video designed to encourage young people to study agriculture at Massey University has been won by two Massey ag students in their final year, Fraser Dymond and Chris Poole.
The idea of the video was to show prospective students in a light hearted way what life is like doing an ag course at Massey as seen through the eyes of students. The winning video and the runner up attracted both applause and laughter from the audience.
Fraser Dymond and Chris Poole say they decided as soon as the competition was announced that they wanted to enter and progressively shot footage over the past couple of months. Dymond says the biggest challenge was deciding what to leave out.
"We only had three minutes so there were a lot of things we had to cut out that we would have liked to have in. We went down to Lincoln University and we took a lot of the footage of the farms down there. Then in the last couple of days before the deadline we filmed a lot of footage around Massey just to showcase the university," he says.
A feature of the video was the amount of spectacular footage shot by Poole using a drone.
Rural News general manager, Adam Fricker says it was great to be a part of the Massey Ag Students awards night. He says the winning and runner up videos were excellent and hopefully these will encourage more young people to make a career in the agribusiness sector.
"The Rural News Group is proud to support a range of initiatives to encourage young people to make a career in the agribusiness sector. Few people are aware of just how efficient and technology savvy our farmers are. They don't see the computing power in dairy sheds, wool sheds, pack houses and all other facets of the primary sector. They don't see precision agriculture in action and the growing sophistication of the machinery used on farms," he says.
