Another year, more challenges for Tas ag | OPINION

All you see on the television at present is a constant stream of reports on bad weather elsewhere around the world (and North Island Australia is copping a fair amount of these reports as well).

Tasmania usually escapes this.

So, back to the heading of this column: What challenges do we have to face up to in 2024?

I've mentioned before the challenge of maintaining a productive agricultural workforce.

We are lucky now not to have predominantly manual production systems as mechanisation gets increasingly sophisticated but you still need people to keep that mechanisation going.

Where they come from is a moot point.

Pacific labour mobility delivers jobs for Pacific and Timor-Leste workers help to fill the labour gaps in regional and rural Australia.

This offers Australian agricultural employers access to productive workers who do a lot for the cultural and economic vibrancy of communities and also enables them to earn income and support their families back home.

The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) is the Australian government's temporary migration program scheme.

Different industries and the states have seasonal labour strategies.

Tasmanian businesses employ approximately 1500 seasonal workers from the Pacific Islands and Timor-Leste through the PALM and other schemes.

But what about growing our own agricultural workers?

There's a lot to be said for having teachers spend a year working in a production system to ensure that what their students get is based on real life experience.

It should cut both ways with people in industry spending a year in a school to ensure their company knows how teaching works.

There's a good case for introducing "sandwich" course qualifications, where half of the year is spent in school or college, and half actually working in industry.

I'll repeat that: "actually working in industry".

Not just observing what others are doing, but actually doing some real work themselves.

I went through this process myself. I spent half a year in the pharmaceutical industry, half a year at the huge applied research centre of a multinational company and half a year at a government research station in Sweden, so I know what it's about.

Maintaining a productive agricultural workforce is the main challenge for us in agriculture in 2024 but there are others.

It depends where you're coming from. I reckon, from where I sit, that raising a positive profile of Tasmania in general, and Tasmanian agriculture in particular, around the globe is one.

There are still people who, when asked for a knee-jerk reaction to their perception of Tasmania, will talk about its penal colony ancestry and the 1996 notorious mass murdering at Port Arthur.

How this can be done is up to the industry itself. I'm not talking about a campaign, which, by definition, has a finite time frame.

No, I'm talking about a relentless ongoing process to ensure that mentions about Tasmanian agricultural products in the media are always positive; there, that's an obvious challenge.

The ongoing process really ought to start at the top end of primary school and be part of the core curriculum, not an option.

That should be nationwide, which is another challenge.

There's no shortage of organisations which could be involved. It's up to us to fossick around and contact them.

Time will tell what happens.