The search is on the for the country's best high school agricultural programs. It's part of a national strategy to improve teaching resources, counter negative perceptions of ag, and attract more students. Surprisingly, one of the most successful schools is right in the middle of Sydney.
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00:00 No, it's not a coffee shop.
00:08 This is agricultural education, North Shore style.
00:12 This is the region where coffee is grown in the world.
00:15 Where Sydney-born Scott Graham and his team at Barker College are converting a growing
00:20 number of urban kids to ag.
00:24 Out of our 420 or so students doing agriculture from Year 9 to 12, probably about 8 or so
00:29 are actually borders from rural regional areas.
00:33 The rest of them really are from the North Shore and the northern beaches of Sydney,
00:36 so they have virtually no connection to agriculture at all.
00:39 We've got durian today as our fruit of the week.
00:42 It's probably the smelliest fruit out there.
00:45 It tastes a lot better than it smells.
00:47 What do you think?
00:49 No, no good?
00:51 From coffee classes to exotic fruits, here learning about paddock to plate is done in
00:57 reverse.
00:58 I'd say our philosophy really is plate to paddock.
01:01 In education you really typically start with things that are concrete and you work towards
01:05 things that are abstract.
01:06 It makes the most sense to students.
01:07 And of course they all eat food and wear clothes and so really starting at that point and working
01:13 backwards is the way to really engage them in a metropolitan context.
01:18 When you're surrounded by the city, teaching the paddock part of the syllabus requires
01:22 excursions and a clever use of space.
01:26 So these ones are warraggle greens.
01:29 While these students do get their hands on all types of crops and livestock, a big part
01:34 of the program is focusing on the 60 to 70 per cent of ag jobs that happen off farm,
01:41 with graduates going on to pursue everything from plant breeding and robotics to product
01:47 development.
01:48 Agriculture in metropolitan high schools really has been overlooked.
01:51 I mean two thirds of Australia's population live in only five cities and so if we're really
01:55 going to change the number of people going into agriculture it's going to require something
01:59 different to happen in metropolitan areas in agriculture.
02:06 Schools like Barker are increasingly on Anthony Lee's mind.
02:10 He's the CEO of Australian Country Choice, one of the world's largest family owned cattle
02:17 and beef suppliers.
02:18 What you've got to do is you've got to have a market for everything.
02:22 While some find boning rooms confronting, he thinks students should see what happens
02:27 to animals in between the paddock and plate.
02:31 If you look at a young kid on a bush property, a remote property somewhere, they are exposed
02:36 to it from birth.
02:37 We don't see that in urban Australia, in metro Australia, so it's very foreign to us.
02:42 I have a view that we absolutely expose people to it.
02:46 Yep, now tight, look where you're going, look where you're going.
02:52 Now sparked by his own kids, the Brisbane based father of four is taking his passion
02:57 for education beyond the meat works.
03:01 Because while his children have grown up with a love for the bush and respect for its industries,
03:07 he says they weren't learning much about ag at school and what they did hear was largely
03:13 negative.
03:14 I heard things like, you know, you're part of the problem or I'm hearing that the beef
03:18 industry is really bad and we shouldn't be eating meat.
03:21 Why would a teacher want to teach it?
03:23 Why would a kid want to come into the industry?
03:25 It's all the same issue if they're hearing bad things.
03:28 So for the last year he's been lobbying for an overhaul of agricultural education.
03:35 Most industries would kill to have their industry in the curriculum.
03:39 We have it in there, we just need to get it taught.
03:41 [BLANK_AUDIO]