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Kate Stewart with Rural News Group’s Peter Burke
Kate Stewart, helped by a pet ram lamb Skippy, won this year’s Massey University Rural News Group-sponsored video competition.
The competition involved students creating a ‘commercial’ to encourage students in secondary schools to choose a career in agri and Massey University as the place to do this.
Good entries poured in, but none could head off Skippy the lamb, who led viewers on a tour of the university, on field trips and even to the Massey/Lincoln exchange visit.
This was the clear and popular winner.
Stewart, who has now completed her ag science degree, hales from Palmerston North and is heading to Te Awamutu as a DairyNZ trainee consulting officer. While she doesn’t come from a farm, her grandparents do.
“I went to Palmy girls college, but my grandparents have a dairy farm 20 minutes out of the city and I love the people and animals – especially calving,” she told Rural News. “I’d stay out with my grandparents every weekend so that sparked the love of agriculture.”
Stewart says she saw others making videos and after taking Skippy along to campus she decided he had a good story to tell.
“So I put the footage together and entered it in the competition. I enjoyed making the video as I hadn’t made one since I was at secondary school. It was quite a challenge at times, but Skippy cooperated and didn’t leave any ‘visiting cards’ in the library,” she says.
Stewart also won the Young Farmers Sally Hobson Award.
Farmer interest continues to grow as a Massey University research project to determine the benefits or otherwise of the self-shedding Wiltshire sheep is underway. The project is five years in and has two more years to go. It was done mainly in the light of low wool prices and the cost of shearing. Peter Burke recently went along to the annual field day held Massey's Riverside farm in the Wairarapa.
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