FARM CADET TRAINING

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28133, 23 November 1956, Page 18

FARM CADET TRAINING

Instructor’s Comment On Scheme

Farmers should be prepared to pay premium rates for the services of youths who have completed satisfactorily an approved course of training, according to Mr G. B. McLeod, instructor in agriculture at the Rangiora High School. He made this comment during an address to the annual reunion of cadets of the Canterbury Youth Farm Advisory Council. (A correspondent to “The Press.” signing himself “Interested” has written saying that the report of the address gave the impression that Mr McLeod gave unqualified support to the whole scheme. The report was supplied by the council. The text of Mr McLeod’s remarks has now been obtained and his other views are now given.) Mr McLeod said that a lad going straight to a dairy farm on award wages earned £220 a year, perhaps more, and would gain experience in all practical activities. A cadet under the training scheme spent his first year at the Rangiora High School where he had to pay about £5O above the £4O boarding allowance and Jie would get about one-eighth of the experience the school farm had to offer with very little repetition of instruction. “He certainly cannot realise what a full day's work is,” Mr McLeod said. The lad also took two terms of English, geography, farm bookkeeping, and agriculture in class.

Both these lads were then no longer inexperienced, both were acceptable as farm workers, and entitled to the same wages, Mr McLeod continued. The difference was that the lad going directly to a farm was about £270 better off financially. Yet the others had paid for training. Training for what? Training to be farm workers. If some farmers were not prepared to teach boys in the early stages they should be happy to accept a scheme of premiums for a trained assistant. The Canterbury Youth Farm Advisory Council’s aims had his wholehearted support, said Mr McLeod, but was the council defeating its own purpose when the effect of its cadet scheme at Rangiora was to take away from boys of the ordinary agricultural course the limited amount of practical experience which the farm had to offer? “Why send boys from Christchurch and other schools to Rangiora for a course which tends to rob the existing boys of valuable experience? Each year out of an intake of about 30 boys in agriculture. 10 did not come from farms. This stage of affairs has existed for many years—the eight years of the cadet training scheme. “I am not against the scheme,” Mr McLeod emphasised. “I think the arrangements for boys after the first year are good. I am only doubting the value of the first year at Rangiora.”