Addressing agriculture’s national workforce shortage

The event focused on the conversation around attracting and retaining the right skill force for the agricultural community. RMCG’s Dr Anne-Maree Boland was one of the presenters given the opportunity to share experiences that could help make on-farm Human Resources (HR) easier and less stressful for farmers.

RMCG’s Principal, Dr Anne-Maree Boland presenting at the inaugural People in Agriculture forum 2024.

Held in South Australia the forum’s take-home message was the urgent need to think differently about on farm employment and assist the farming community in applying the latest knowledge in recruitment and people management skills.

Mapping the future of agriculture’s workforce

Anne-Maree delivered the findings from a recent project, managed by RMCG’s Brooke Hermans, titled Mapping the workforce of Australian agriculture. The project identified significant gaps in data currently collected on workforce, that’s required to inform sector and industry policies and decisions.

“It is crucial to attract, develop and retain a skilled workforce. Therefore high-quality, up-to-date and detailed workforce data is essential to underpin evidence-based strategies and policies that deliver the workforce needed to meet the above aspirations,” Anne-Maree said.

The AgriFutures Australia project managed by Brooke Hermans offered recommendations for industry to strengthen the collection, analysis and application of workforce specific data.

“A common challenge faced by different agriculture industries (agricultural, fisheries and forestry sector) is the varied workforce data collection methods across government bodies, RDCs, agriculture sectors and employers,” Brooke said

The forum was initiated by Danielle England from AgInnovate an agriculture consultancy firm and sponsored by AgriFutures Australia, the Grains Research and Development Corporation and Drover Ag Agricultural Recruitment.

Open discussion amongst delegates at the People in Agriculture forum.

Looking ahead

“The forum’s point-of-difference was that all presenters highlighted the dilemma facing the ‘agricultural workforce gap’ and highlighting that it can’t solely fall on individual farmers to solve the issue,” Anne-Maree said.

“The focus has now switched to teaching and improving farmers people management skills so they can attract and retain staff and become employers of choice in the agriculture sector.”

The forum created enough concern and drive about the workforce crisis for the conversation to continue.

“We now need to ascertain the next steps moving forward and keep the conversation going by gathering the right people together, igniting connections across industries. We can all learn from other’s experiences by finding out what is working for some agricultural sectors”.

Find out more about our work in agriculture.