YOUTH FARM TRAINING

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28950, 18 July 1959, Page 9

YOUTH FARM TRAINING

Farmers 9 Help Essential It should be a matter of gratification to farmers that the Canterbury Youth Farm Advisory Council has decided to continue its farm training scheme for young men though it will not now be able to place trainees at the Rangiora High School in their first year. While the training scheme in its new form is now being worked out. discussions this week following the annual meeting of the council indicated that for the right young men it will still offer a very worthwhile grounding for farm ownership or for a position in the farming industry. It seems likely that the scheme will still be of four years’ duration with a year’s probationary period, the four years being spent on at least two types of farms to ensure breadth of experience. Selection of trainees will be on a broad basis and they will be required to have about three years of post-primary school education. To give them a technical as well as a practical background it is likely that they will have to take one agricultural course with the technical correspondence school each year. Trainees will have to undergo both practical and oral tests, and at the end of the four years they will have the opportunity of qualifying for a certificate. One of the major factors on which the success of the new scheme will depend will be the availability of farmers willing to take these boys. Naturally the council will have to take some steps to be sure that farmers who offer themselves are suitable persons for this task, and While to some such an investigation, if it can be called that, might seem objectionable, it is only reasonable, and as a speaker said at the annual meeting, farmers could regard it as a privilege to be classified in the category of suitable persons. A farmer on the council suggested that a farmer and his wife might find it unsatisfactory to have to give up a trainee after two years where the farmer and his wife and the youth got on well together, but other speakers at the meeting emphasised that in the interests of a broad and sound training a provision that the training should be done on at least two types of farms was desirable.

An important point made at the meeting and yet often overlooked by even farmers themselves is that the training should not only be undertaken with farm ownership as the goal—that in farming there should be many worthwhile and satisfying jobs in addition to owning land. Farmers would seem to have a duty to see that this is in fact the case.

The secretary of the council is Mr M. T. Butterick, of the Vocational Guidance Centre in Christchurch.