Lincoln students will be helping to ease the pressure on rural contractors who are missing migrant workers due to Covid-19 restrictions.
As well as offering qualifications that are designed to meet the future employment needs of the food and fibre sector, Lincoln is helping the sector now, by changing its compulsory practical work study requirements to include rural contracting.
The Government’s Targeted Training and Apprenticeship Fund is covering course costs for four Lincoln University sub-degree programmes (diplomas in horticulture, agriculture, farm management and organic agri-food production), from July 2020 until December 2022.
All have a practical work requirement, as do many other programmes at the land-based university.
Rural contractor work could include hay and silage baling, as well as spraying, muck spreading, shearing, ploughing and other tractor operation and bulk supplementary feed production.
Acting Vice-Chancellor Professor Bruce McKenzie said Lincoln was strongly connected to the sector and the change followed a discussion with Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor about how the university could help.
“We are happy to be able to do something practical that will assist, while also giving our students wider experience. We are being innovative in our course offerings to meet sector needs and looking at how we can meet the future and current needs of the food and fibre sector.”
Agribusiness lecturer Dan Smith said large numbers of British and Irish workers typically travelled to New Zealand to complete this work and many rural contractors would usually be in the United Kingdom recruiting staff now.
“Given the current global pandemic, it is unlikely these workers will have the freedom to come here, which will place a lot of pressure on these businesses. This was putting pressure on contractors to fill their needs.”
He said the practical work components of Lincoln’s agricultural degrees and diplomas required students to work on-farm to gain experience.
“This year, Lincoln University will extend the parameters of this practical work to allow students to get out and work for rural contractors. We see the value in this experience and we also see the incredible importance of the rural contractor industry.
“We hope that allowing the students to count rural contracting work towards their practical work requirement will alleviate some of the pressure on these contractors and provide the students with a taste of how these hard-working members of the New Zealand agriculture industry operate.”
