From the paddock, not the shelves

Jan Davis, ABC pic

I am told there is a golden rule in journalism: one should never make assumptions. In particular, when writing about a topical subject, one should never assume that people know the background to the subject. In other words, SPELL IT OUT.

It is an adage that we might well apply to farming. This week came the shock, horror news that Australian schoolchildren appear to have no idea where their food and fibre come from. They don’t relate cotton to a plant; they don’t relate yoghurt to an animal.

These are some of the findings of a survey that the Australian Council of Educational Research carried out for the Primary Industries Education Foundation:

• only 55 per cent of students know that bread, cheese and bananas originate from farmed products;
• 40 per cent of Year 10 students believe farming damages the environment;
• 46 per cent of students see no link between the use of on‐farm inputs and increased food production;
• 75 per cent of Year 6 students think cotton socks are an animal product;
• 27 per cent of students think yoghurt is a plant product;
• more than 66 per cent of students believe most logs harvested come from native forests.

You can put that last one down to propaganda, but, in general, nobody – parents, teachers, farmers – seems to be doing their job properly when it comes to communicating the link between food and its source. There is a disconnect. Milk doesn’t come from cows; it comes from the supermarket.

Therefore, we have to ensure that:

• we educate Australians about where and how food and fibre are produced;
• we protect our scarce remaining farmland from competing pressures, e.g. urban expansion, mining, etc;
• Australian farmers can compete on a level playing field by minimising unnecessary regulation and red tape and by requiring that food imported into Australia meets the same standards as home-grown product;
• we buy Australian whenever possible.

How do we do that? By ensuring that food supply and the need for food security are on the national education curriculum. It is incomprehensible to me that they are not. I would have thought that what you put in your mouth, what you clothe yourself in, what your house is made of, how it is built, are pretty fundamental tools to master before taking your place in society.

What flows from this? If there is the level of ignorance in our schools about, in our case, the role of agriculture in everyday life, how are we going to attract those same young people into agricultural careers? It appears to be irrelevant or immaterial to them because they have never made the nexus between food and the land in which it is grown. Can you imagine this situation applying to the Inuit people? Fish comes from the supermarket?

The disconnect between town and country in Australia is serious and, as the Primary Industries Education Foundation suggests, the people who will need to solve the problems related to food security in the future are either currently in school or are yet to be born but, so far, the formal Australian curriculum has no direct reference to sustainable food and fibre production.

That being so, how can we be confident that we are maximising the effort to fire the imaginations of potential agronomists, food technologists, let alone farmers and food producers and processors out there?

This would be funny if it were not so serious. I can assure you it is something that has been exercising our minds at the TFGA and is one of the prime challenges we are addressing in helping to develop an overall agricultural plan for the state. We believe that one of the keys is to personalise or humanise the food chain, to put Tasmanian faces to Tasmanian food products. Then our kids might begin to understand what it’s all about.