EDUCATION FOR THE POTENTIAL FARMER

Press, Volume C, Issue 29602, 26 August 1961, Page 7

EDUCATION FOR THE POTENTIAL FARMER

I?OR the young man who wants to take up a farming career Canterbury Agricultural College offers a diploma course, and for the man who has been in farming for a time ancj feels the need to extend his knowledge, or who does not have the educational qualifications to enter the diploma or degree courses, it offers an intensive course.

Dr. I. D. Blair, reader in microbiology, writing in a Canterbury Chamber of Commerce bulletin, makes the point that in the opinion of many the products of the diploma course have been., and may still be, possibly the greatest direct contribution of the college to New Zealand agriculture. There have been discussions about the role of the college in agricultural education, he notes. Some hold the view that it should be an all-degree course institution and others are in favour of a predominantly degree institution with a limited intake of diploma students receiving short-term intensive instruction in theory and management. “Up to the present the college has accepted the viewpoint that the diploma course of 80 years’ standing has served the country well,” says Dr. Blair, “that the diploma students predominantly bent on becoming farmers are a vital part of the college as a living or human institution, and that the complexity of practical and scientific agriculture cannot be covered in a short-term course.” For the course for the diploma in agriculture preference is given to those of 18 years of age with a school certificate standard of education and who, after leaving school, have had two years of practical farm experience. The student enters residence at the college for the first academic session of two tennis in March and completes this session in mid-August. In August he is required to proceed on a plan of approved farm work on properties where his pre-entry training will be further extended. To qualify for the diploma the students, before the end of the course, must produce evidence that they have worked for a minimum period on two of the farm types—dairy, mixed cropping and sheep. After six months of farm work the student returns to the college in March for the second academic session of similar length. The aim of the certificate in agriculture or intensive course is to give a balanced course of one academic year of three terms extending from March to November. The idea is to provide a course for older men who have missed earlier opportunities to advance agricultural education and to provide a course for those whose limited educational qualifications may have precluded their entry into either degree or diploma courses. Dr. Blair says that any young farmer can learn ’he facts oj agriculture from “any hard school of experience.” but this process is not economical today, nor will it serve the needs of the future with its problems which will tax the best of farmer intelligence.

In making out a case tor the potential farmer taking a course like those offered at

the college Dr. Blair points to the need for a good proportion of those entering farming developing as leaders in farming thought. Further “these recrpits require knowledge as much as practical experience. They need ability to reason on technical and managerial problems as much as dexterity in farm skills.”

The man who is going to be on his farm a very Long time stands to benefit from a session away from the property at Lincoln, particularly if he was born on it, and then went to, perhaps, a district high school lot a brief period. But in fact country students are in a minority in these courses. Over the last four yea... 60 per cent, of the diploma course students have come from the cities. One very important point that Dr. Blair makes about these courses is that the student can work his way through very* well with little need for support from his parents.