Professional Agriculture – a Case of Supply and Demand

The agricultural industry is at the crossroads in terms of workforce capacity. Evidence is presented that there is a sizeable job market in agriculture and more than 4000 jobs per year are consistently being advertised seeking agricultural professionals. Conversely the number of graduates being supplied by Australian universities continues to decline significantly and is less than 20% of the number needed to satisfy the job market. Capacity therefore looms as the most significant issue for the agricultural industry as it endeavours to take advantage of the opportunities created by food security. The challenge is to make prospective students aware that careers in agriculture are at least as interesting, rewarding and challenging as in most other industries. Introduction Agriculture has always been a complex business. In the 21 Century, however, the degree of complexity has intensified. Not only do farmers and their advisers need to contend with the usual production issues, they also need to be increasingly self‐reliant in the marketing of their products, ensuring market quality and supply. There has always been a need to deal with climate variability but predictions indicate that this variability will increase and there is increased expectation for farmers to manage the risk of drought. The compliance aspects of the workplace continue to increase as occupational health and safety provisions apply together with, inter alia, pesticide management, flock care and stewardship of GM crops. At the same time agriculture manages over 60% of the Australian landscape and thus assumes the responsibility for native vegetation, landscape sustainability, biodiversity and the like. Technologies such as GPS, precision agriculture and remote sensing are now having impact and there is increasing expectation on agriculture to address carbon emissions and play its part in the carbon economy. Farmers need increased personal capacity but thus will need greater reliance on expert advice from outside the farm. Research and development will continue to be needed to develop systems and technologies that allow productivity gains to maintain farm profitability and address the needs and opportunities in food security nationally and globally. The industry, from the farm, the service and post‐farm gate sectors and in R&D, requires a workforce which is highly educated, highly skilled and with an image and reputation that is attractive to the best and brightest. As markets become more discriminatory in respect of quality and production practices, accreditation will become increasingly important and the industry will need to have robust mechanisms in place to assure those markets. Benchmarking education in agriculture On any analysis, the educational standards of the agricultural industry do not stand up well to scrutiny (Figure 1). Over the past quarter of a century the proportion of the Australian community with tertiary qualifications has increased from just below 10% of the workforce to more than 25%. In contrast, in the agricultural sector, only 4% were degree holders in 1984 and in 2009 that proportion has risen to only around 7%. The gap is widening, yet food production would seem to be an essential service industry where standards should be unquestionably high. Figure 1 Relative proportions of the agricultural sector and the Australian community with tertiary qualifications, 1994‐2009 (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics) The comparisons are also stark if the relative proportions of the workforce without post‐school qualifications are considered (Figure 2). Whereas the Australian community at large has reduced the proportion from 54% in 1984 to around 33% in 2009, the agricultural industry has achieved a reduction from 73% to only 58% in the same time – that gap also continues to widen. Figure 2 Relative proportions of the agricultural sector and the Australian community with no post‐school qualifications, 1984‐2009 (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics) It is clear from these statistics that education of its workforce has not been a high priority for the agricultural industry. Yet this became a concern for the Heads of Agriculture schools within universities where declining enrolments were being experienced whilst at the same time industry employers were complaining about the lack of graduates. In order to address this issue in particular, the Australian Council of Deans of Agriculture was formed in 2007. Further investigation by the ACDA revealed the government policy position at the time was that graduate supply was plentiful but that job prospects were poor. This conflicted with the experience of the ACDA members who embarked on a data gathering exercise to clarify the conflict. In this process it was discovered that graduate numbers used by government included all environmental science and management graduates and that the job market projections were based on advertisements placed only in selected metropolitan newspapers. Graduate supply in agriculture Data were collected from all universities with undergraduate courses in agriculture and in related areas. Such data were collected from 2001 until the present to establish trend lines. Figure 3 shows the graduate completions in agriculture courses over time and Figure 4 shows the data for agriculture and related courses for the same period. Where available, comparisons are made with the 1980s using data derived from the “McColl Report” (McColl et al., 1991). Completions in the latter case were estimated in proportion to enrolments in the various levels of qualifications and so there are likely to be small errors in the absolute numbers used, although comparisons are not likely to be significantly compromised. In the late 1980s there was a marked increase in the number of graduates with agriculture degrees, due largely to the conversion from diploma qualifications to degrees in the Colleges of Advanced Education (CAE) sector. Diploma qualifications have largely disappeared from tertiary education institutions since then. There was also a small component of 2‐year associate degrees at that time and they have also become virtually extinct. Together degrees and associate degrees in agriculture delivered to industry around 800 graduates in the late 1980s. In the 21 Century, numbers had declined to around 500 in 2001 and that decline has continued such that only 300 degree graduates in agriculture entered the workforce at the end of 2010. There has been a 40% decline in last 10 years. Figure 3 Graduate completions in 3 and 4 year agriculture courses from Australian universities for the period 2001‐2009 inclusive and estimated from McColl report for years 1986‐1989 including 2 year associate degrees The agricultural industry, however, also receives value from graduates in related degrees such as horticulture, agribusiness, animal science and agricultural economics (Figure4). Whereas the total graduation cohort from agriculture and agricultural‐related degrees was around 1000 per year in the early part of the recent decade, the number has declined to around 800 in 2010, ie a 20% decline. However it should be noted that a sizeable proportion of these are animal science graduates, only some of whom (probably fewer than half)are interested in livestock production with the remainder focused on wildlife and companion animals. The total available to the agricultural workforce then is closer to 700. Whereas animal science degrees were not available for the period studied in the McColl Report, there has been a proliferation of university courses in animal science in more recent times to capitalise on high student demand and, in many cases, to capitalise on the overflow of high quality students unsuccessful in their attempts to gain entry into Veterinary Science. Figure 4 Graduate completions in 3 and 4 year courses in agricultural and related areas from Australian universities for the period 2001‐2009 inclusive. The data in horticulture reveal a substantial decline as well. This sector during the 1980s was characterised by a relatively small cohort of degree graduates and a high associate degree activity. These consolidated into degrees and at the turn of the century there were about 120 graduates per year. This reflected the buoyant position of viticulture at that time but there has been a decline in the number of providers related to the downturn in the grape industry. These numbers also include graduates in the amenity horticulture field as well as the very few in production horticulture. Thus the production horticulture industry will be dependant on agriculture graduates for its professional workforce, as before, and so will have to compete with the rest of the agricultural industry for employees. Several universities in recent times have deleted horticulture degrees from their profile. Figure 5 Graduate completions in horticulture/viticulture from Australian universities for the period 2001‐2009 and the degree completions estimated from the McColl report for the period 1986‐1989 including 2 year associate degrees The discipline of agricultural economics did not have associate degrees in the 1980s and so comparisons are straight forward. Completions back then were around 80 to 90 per year but in the recent decade is now around 50 per year except for a peak in 2006. Only 3 universities provide graduates in this area with the University of Sydney providing the vast majority. Student demand suggests that there will be no new providers in the market any time soon. Figure 6 Graduate degree completions in agricultural economics for the period 2001‐2009 inclusive together with estimates of degree completions from the McColl Report for 1986‐1989 In agribusiness/agicultural commerce, the main qualification in the 1980s was the associate degree being around 80% of the market. Together with degrees, these awards provided more than 200 graduates per year. In the evolution to degree‐only awards in the last two decades there has been considerable fluctuation around 150 graduates per year declining to fewer than 100 in 2010. Figure 7 Graduate degree completions in agribusiness for the period 2001‐2009 inclusive together with estimates of degree completions from the McColl Report for 1986‐1989 including 2 year associate degrees