Clive Dalton
Question 1.
What’s the biggest national threat
facing the New Zealand dairy industry in the next 5-10 years? The low milksolids payout due to a world surplus of milk powder is the wrong answer. The correct
answer is farm staff literacy and numeracy, as it’s now recognised that 50% of
new recruits entering farming cannot effectively read or write to a level where
they can keep records or follow a manual.
They also cannot do basic maths or measure accurately. They have never learned their times tables!
So calculating the volume of a silage pit
(LxBxH), then knocking off 5% waste, and working out the length of a grazing
area of 1.7ha if one side is 50m are complete mysteries, as is mixing a 7% teat
spray solution. And don’t ever
mention fractions.
When at The Waikato Polytechnic I must have
wasted hours trying to teach these basic maths. Thank goodness for metrics, calculators
with a percentage and a square root button, if you could students to understand where they would be useful.
Question 2. Who is going to fix this appalling
situation? Be very afraid, as
the answer is ‘nobody knows’.
It’s an unbelievable situation, and instead
of schools being able to solve the problem, they have to live with it, and look
the other way at the end of the year when year 13 students leave for the last time,
heading hopefully for further training.
None of the teachers I talk to are happy
about this situation, and are adamant that the latest education reforms will do nothing
to solve it. The Minister of
Education keeps telling us that she wants every Kiwi child to have access to a
good education. Farmers wonder if
they’ll live long enough to see it happen.
When I ask teachers for a solution, they
point out that no school has the time, the resources or the money to fix things
at their level. You cannot hold
back 15-17 year-olds, and put the hard word on them to do extra work till they become
literate and numerate as happened in the old days. This would now be classed as harassment!
Blame
So all I hear is blame! High school teachers blame intermediate
schools, which then blame primary schools, whose teachers tell me the problem
starts in the home, with kids arriving at school with no vocabulary and never
having seen books or have had stories read to them. All agree that there just isn’t enough money spent in primary schools on
support to fix the problem there.
These young folk are not dummies – the education system has let them
down.
Old teachers bemoan the poor literacy and numeracy
of new graduates finishing Universities with degrees in education. How do they get accepted?
Something very odd going
on
With modern technology and
social media, there have never been so many words written by young folk. So how
can they be constantly ‘on line’ texting, tweeting, face booking and emailing
and not be able to read and write English needed for the workforce? They are
all keyboard wizards, so don’t need pens or handwriting, and they are not
scared to learn new things by trial and error.
The problem is that the industry is full of
labels and manuals written in technical English that even the literate can
struggle with at times. This situation won’t change, due to legal requirements
covering manufacturers, to protect them from mis-interpretation of directions
and being sued.
The million-dollar question.
How long can farming and other trades wait
till all this education disaster is sorted? The
honest answer is that they cannot.
What are current dairy farmers doing to fix
things, as they are the ones copping the result? Not a lot I’d suggest at present, with the CTU estimating that
only 50% of farmers spend any money on staff training, and few pay more for
staff with training qualifications.
The solution is very clear to me, if the
Minister of Primary Industry wants export earnings doubled by 2025, and needing
50,000 new recruits, the Prime Minister needs to give him a boost in the caucus
pecking order so he has the clout with the Minister of Finance to pour some
serious money into the Primary ITO as a major priority as we speak.
Then dairy farmers, Federated Farmers,
Fonterra and other dairy companies, DairyNZ, LIC and everybody with an interest
in the dairy industry has to push madly to pressure Treasury on behalf of the
PrimaryITO – and pour more of their money into the pot.
Primary ITO
The PrimaryITO are the only ones who have an overall view of
what’s needed and who really understand how to fix things urgently, to stop all
the duplication and waste by so many education providers, and to get modern
technology into the teaching business pronto.
We don’t want any more inquiries, scoping
groups, research and bureaucratic diversions. The Minister of Primary Industry has to solve the problem by
supercharging the Primary ITO, as the Minister of Education clearly can’t help
the farming industry, and neither can the Minister of Innovation.
The fall-back solution in the very short term is more
immigrant labour, but that’s not the answer as training them brings another set of
cultural and religious challenges, which I suggest is not yet on the Minister’s priority job list.
The other solution is more technology. More robotics are on their way!
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| Who will operate dairy farms in future? Humans or robots? |
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