 Thanks. I'm Cassandra Hughes from Regions Development, Great Southern in WA. Isabel, I wondered the skills you identified. I'm not sure I've never done an agricultural degree, but I have done a business degree, and they all fall into a business degree category. So between Isabel and Neil, I wondered, does our modern agricultural degree equip our young people, or is it a different type of degree that we're expecting them to be able to manage those farm businesses? Okay, so, I mean, it's a really great question, and I have a great answer for you, fortunately. Traditionally, there's been a real separation in universities between hard sciences and the social sciences, often quite profound separation. But you'll see, if you look across the universities now, many of us are offering agri-business programs or dual degrees. So in my own university, University of Queensland, you can enroll in a Bachelor of Sustainable Agriculture and, at the same time, a Bachelor of Agri-business. So you get that spectrum of hard science through to the business and social sciences. And really, that's a recognition that the vast majority of our students are not going to start uni, do a PhD, become researchers. We're not trying to build clones of ourselves. Historically, in the big universities, we tended to do that a lot more. So the nature of agricultural education now, far more than in the past, quits students better for the fact that they'll be running a big business. And the biophysical part of it is, and you did a great job of showing this, it's just a couple of those dot points. There are a lot of others which are about running the business and dealing with people. I just add to that that some of the agricultural consultancy businesses in my region have a quite clear policy of only employing dual degree agriculture, finance or agriculture, or agri-business graduates. A young son is doing a dual degree in agriculture and business because his mother encouraged him to look at it that way too. There we have another question. Jeff Lucas from the Lucas Group. I involved in employment in agriculture and have been for about 25 years. My question, and it also sat on various advisory groups for various universities, including your group of deans. What strategy have you put in place from a university or the dean's perspective in terms of engaging with the younger people? And I don't mean years 10, 11 and 12. I mean primary school children in terms of attracting them to agriculture as a career of first choice. Once again, when I'm at a tempter field and it's a difficult one to field in the sense of different universities have taken different approaches and the Australian government has its own approach of the primary industry education foundation as a way to reach down in the spectrum of the schools to introduce agriculture, thinking about agriculture as something early enough that we're capturing those young hearts and minds. I would say of the universities once again a self-criticism. We've tended to go out and talk to students in grade 11 so that in grade 12 they will come to the university to do whatever it is that we've gone to sell, whether that's agriculture or law or medicine. And that's too late. They've already made decisions about the courses that they're going to do. They already have formed a perception of themselves in their career. So hearing in grade 11 that agriculture is a cool place to be. Well, clearly that's for some other students because I'm going to be a doctor or I'm going to be a lawyer or an engineer. So the general idea that we need to be back earlier in students' life at school is an important one but I think we need to be fitting that into existing parts of their education. So a way to illustrate a chemistry point is to use a soil science example obviously as a soil scientist but an agricultural example. Biology, physics, mathematics to introduce the idea of agriculture broadly across the curriculum rather than it being a specific thing. Now a lot of our schools have agriculture as an area of study but it tends to be where you send the less academically inclined students. So for my own university those students are unlikely to be coming to us for an education and so hence this real need to get the full spectrum of students in schools interested in agriculture. And I guess you're seeing the scientist type speaking here. It doesn't need to just be in the sciences. The social sciences, business part, things that are taught at school across a very broad spectrum can see agriculture as the examples that they use. How we achieve that is really the next challenge and the deans of agriculture are active and the various universities are active in our own spheres. Education is a state-based activity so it's not something we can sort across the nation but rather that we need to do state by state. There's another question up the back but just before we move to that I was wondering whether Sue or Isabel might want to comment from your perspectives as having young children of your own or your work with families about how they feel about the way their own... Well, I'd just like to take some of the heat off the uni system. Thanks. It's not up to the university on their own to attract people to agriculture. It is, as we like to say, the whole supply chain that's got to step up to the mark here. We actually have to say that we have got great jobs. We can't just say we're selling a product. We've got to sell the whole skills, the adventure that you're going to go on this journey into agriculture. Look, it's got its bad points but, you know, it has some fantastic parts in it as well. I have got four children. I've got two engineers, one medical technologist and a son who hated the fourth one, who hated agriculture but who last month started as a cotton research worker. So how's that? You know, he did a Masters of Ag at Melbourne and now is doing cotton research. So I'm pretty pleased. Yeah, yeah. Did you want anything? I think just on that, I agree absolutely with what Sue's saying. It's really about us all being much more positive about the opportunities in a much more holistic fashion. And I think in our schools, going back to what Neil said, the curriculum is actually a bit old and it's a bit stale and it's not advancing and it's boring and I think that we need to look at the agricultural curriculum as something that's exciting. It's challenging to those who are intelligent and I think that, you know, maybe that's a place we could have a little look that could make a change. I'm going to take a contrary view on this and I'll go back to one of the young farmers in one of those boot camps who took us to task. In fact, I had his photograph up there and I didn't have time to mention him. He took us to task for helping people get interested in agriculture because he said there's enough competition out there for land as it is and you're not helping me. I don't think there's a shortage of applicants for own operator agriculture. I think there's an oversupply for the number of positions available. I think it's always been thus, which explains the sometimes high prices for land. The only question for me is whether there is a need for increased supply in the professional support occupations and looking at the change from 2006 to 2011 census I can find no evidence of an increase in the number of positions in those occupations. The real issue is people leaving them, which creates the demand. So I think the industry is better off looking at questions of retention rather than looking at attraction. Okay, that's a good point. Now there's one last question from the gentleman in the middle. I'm an agricultural consultant. Let me put the heat back on the universities. If you're going to survive in agriculture, you have to know how to make a profit and that's a skill that universities teach very poorly. In employing many agricultural consultants, the biology is very important. You can't teach an economist the biology, but you can teach a biologist how to make a profit and if you didn't come up off a family farm, I wouldn't employ you because the sociology and the background of agriculture has to be in your veins somehow or other. Any other business that had a graph like yours would either commit suicide or get some help. You know, you're either selling the wrong product or there's nobody that wants to buy. Agricultural research has collapsed. Agricultural servicing has gone dramatically out, increased dramatically. Many young farmers have good qualifications these days and I even have a girl who's inherited a farm who's married a defunct lawyer which given that he was trained to think he's turned into a brilliant farmer. What are places like Marcus Oldham doing? You know, are there numbers up compared to the collapse of people into agriculture? When I started in a degree, the University of New England went all over their region looking and selling their degree and selling some of their services. If you've got a product that nobody wants, mate, it must be time to either change it or sell it. So I think in the words of Tony Jones, I almost take that one as a comment rather than there didn't seem to be a question in there. Was there a question? What's happening at Marcus Oldham in the private sector? They're full. Okay, there is one more question from someone who looks very keen to ask it down the front. So if we pass the microphone down there and then we will need to draw the line even though it's been very lively. Oh, yes, you do. It's right behind you. There it is. Beverly Hardiman, Rural Financial Councillor. Isabel outlined the need for existing farmers to educate, promote, excite their children to go into agriculture. What I'd like to know is how are we going to get that message and the education out to existing farmers so they can bring their kids up to really want to be a farmer? I don't think anybody has any magic wants. I think that a lot of existing farmers are working hard at trying to focus on these other areas of their business management that haven't traditionally been focused upon and as a result they are actually seeing results of their bottom lines. But there is an element of farm business managers that sadly I think are not going to be there for the next generation because they are not willing to adapt and that sounds very harsh but I think that's probably the fact of it. Does it check with the panel? Is there any final comment anybody wants to make? I'd just like to clarify a couple of points from the comment. Agriculture research is not tanking. Australia is so good at it that money is flooding in from international funders. So Monsanto and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, various external entities of funding research in Australia. Horticulture, GRDC, etc. The Levy funding is enormous. So Australia's standing in agricultural research is so high because of the scale of agricultural research in our country. It's enormous. As to whether businesses are viable or not I think that this community would be unhappy if the University of Queensland or my fellow universities decided, well how agriculture is not worth doing, we'll just run a bigger law school. That would be the wrong move for us even though it might not be a viable part of our business. Just one comment. Whilst it's really great to attract your own, the children that you have to agriculture I'd actually like to grow the pie and actually see some new blood come in. It's great that we get stuck thinking that our kids have to love the job that we chose for ourselves. Let the kids decide. I haven't got a comment. I've got a question for Isabel. You can offer me some advice now in my family situation with my parents in their 80s and still farming and my mother wants to keep farming and won't hear anything and my father wants to stop. Is under the impression all the business strategies you talked about they seem to be to a degree scale dependent. You've got to have a certain size to meet all those expectations. How do you deal with it when someone comes up with succession being discussed? Do you have a look at it and say that's just not feasible in your situation to meet those expectations? We have to base our analysis in reality and if the sum total of the expectations isn't met by the ability of the business to deliver then we've either got to reduce our expectations or do something about that gap. It's as simple as that. Okay, I am going to have to draw the line because we have run over by about ten minutes but hopefully that's okay with you because we've done it because we were asking or enabling some questions. So thank you very much and thank you to the panel. Mr Neil Barr, Neil Menzies, Isabel Knight and Sue Finger. Terrific.