Category: AGvocacy

Are the entitled having the important conversations – What is enough ??????

When some-one challenges life as you know it, it gives you an opportunity to reflect on whether you want to support the status quo or step up and say its time to embrace a future focused model.

When we have the capacity to ask ourselves “what is enough” only then can we support and enable next gen Australians to envision a future we all want to be part of.

I invite all of my readers to read this report from Learning Creates Australia and ask ourselves are we setting next gen up for success and if not who is going to put their hand up and lobby for change

 

Agriculture and the “Leaders are Born Mindset” – why has it become part of our identity?

Its been a week of getting my confidence back by stepping up and saying yes to podcasts and interviews

Tonight I get to share my thoughts on leadership

Here is my leadership thought dump of other people’s ideas that resonate with me

Leadership is a process of influence to drive change

We can’t do it alone and we can do it in silos

We must join forces, share resources, skills, knowledge and experiences. Source Julie McAlpin RDA Sydney

I workshopped below with a number of bright minds who came to agriculture from the world beyond and put their toes in the water and went wow the disruptors are very brave people

Agriculture tends to have a “Leaders are Born Mindset”

This has been driven by agriculture’s traditional patriarchal culture where the first born son inherits the farm. This concept has been perpetuated for centuries.

It is a very deep-seated generational identity culture.

In this country women were not allowed to call themselves farmers in the census until 1994

In a sector where you are rewarded for learning to fit in and NOT challenge the status quo we are asking people to re-identify who we are as an industry and as people

Asking people to embrace the concept of “Leaders are Made” will be frightening for a lot of people

This has led to our traditional leadership programs being one off events with no clear pathway of what could be next

These programs are seen as “vehicles” to expose the “born leaders” and position them to fulfil their birth destiny.

and now to the work of the team from The Practice of Adaptive Leadership – Harvard Kennedy School 

How glorious is this concept

Leadership is an experimental art. We are all at the frontier.

Think of your life as a leadership laboratory. In that laboratory, you are continuously facing opportunities for learning how to be more effective in living a meaningful existence, and for making more progress on life’s deepest purposes and leading meaningful change.

Seeing life as a leadership lab enables you to try things out, make mistakes, strengthen your skills, and take pleasure in the journey as well as the fruits of your labour.

This from conversations with our wonderful Young Farming Champions

There is no one size fits all

Young people are doing it differently, the business model has changed

We don’t want to be part of “Old codgers organisations”

We want to ensure young people have a seat at the table

We want to ensure their voices are heard and valued

We can be shapers of “what might we be together”

Back to the brains trust that is the Adaptive Leadership team

The tools and tactics for leading adaptive change should be treated, we believe, in the same spirit as open source technology, made broadly available, so that people who lead adaptive change can learn from each other and improve their skills, and all of us improve our insights into practice.

Leadership for change demands inspiration and perspiration.

We present tools and tactics to lead and stay alive, to build up a sweat by inspiring others, to mobilize people to tackle tough problems while reaching high.

Our work begins with the assumption that there is no reason to exercise leadership, to have a courageous conversation with a boss or a spouse, for example, or to take a risk on a new idea, unless you care about something deeply. What outcome would make the effort and the risk worthwhile?

Trying to create something better from the current reality.

Growing tomorrow’s leaders today moving from reactive to future focused leadership

The practice of leadership, like the practice of medicine, involves two core processes:

  • diagnosis first and then
  • action.

 And those two processes unfold in two dimensions: toward the organizational or social system you are operating in and toward yourself. That is, you diagnose what is happening in your organization or community and take action to address the problems you have identified.

But to lead effectively, you also have to examine and take action toward yourself in the context of the challenge. In the midst of action, you have to be able to reflect on your own attitudes and behaviour to better calibrate your interventions into the complex dynamics of organizations and communities.

You need perspective on yourself as well as on the systemic context in which you operate. The process of diagnosis and action begins with data collection and problem identification (the what), moves through an interpretive stage (the why) and on to potential approaches to action as a series of interventions into the organization, community, or society (the what next).

Typically, the problem-solving process is iterative, moving back and forth among data collection, interpretation, and action.

Adaptive challenges can only be addressed through changes in people’s priorities, beliefs, habits, and loyalties.

Making progress requires going beyond any authoritative expertise to mobilize discovery, shedding entrenched ways, learning from mistakes, and generating the new capacity to thrive anew.

Just love people who wake up everyday to help us create a better world 

 

Advocacy at its worst – when agriculture chooses the divide and conquer route to market

When I got my latest email from the Australian Farm Institute this week  advertising their upcoming conference I couldn’t take it anymore and hit the unsubscribe  button

Our agri-politicans are a great example of how broken our political system is. Like our federal politicians they tend to follow the Allan Jones model and appeal to the prejudices of the masses

“The argumentum ad populum used in democratic political rhetoric can make political argumentation appear to be reason-based when it is not and subvert and undermine reason-based deliberation in democratic political argumentation.”(Douglas Walton, “Criteria of Rationality for Evaluating Democratic Public Rhetoric,” Talking Democracy, ed. by B. Fontana et al. Penn State, 2004)

Its the “them and us” model where farmers are pitched as victims,  and our state farming organisations are our white knights.

As an example when Agforce deleted their data  and lost their credibility in government they decided a roadshow with Peter Ridd was their advocacy model

Its too easy and so lazy to choose to pander to audiences by telling them what you think they want to hear.

This is not advocacy, this divide and conquer and it makes me cringe. Its time to rethink what advocacy looks like because Australian agriculture has some very serious human rights issues we should have addressed a long time ago.

We do have a choice

We can all work together and build a better world or we can focus on bettering our world

Who would you put on the podium if you wanted to hear from people who do advocacy well?

Beside the three very courageous women in the video above some names that come to mind for me

Cows Milk without cows. The birthplace of the Australian dairy industry is stepping up to answer the big questions.

The birthplace of the Australian dairy industry is stepping up to answer the big questions.

What will our rolling green hills look like in 50 years time if cellular agriculture means we can have all the nutrition cows’ milk provides without the cows ?


What will the view from my front verandah look like without the cows?

As a sixth generation dairy farmer this concept seems so far fetched but then so did the smart phone twenty years ago

We have a new council. They plan to make protection of rural lands a pillar. But what are we protecting the land from?

Is the science going to decide for us or are the property developers with deep pockets?

Where does the native flora and fauna fit into all of this?

We have an amazing opportunity to have our voices heard as part of the community consultation process for the new Local Environmental Plan.

I look forward to hearing the community’s hopes and dreams for the future

And what of our dairy farmers and the cows. What does Just Transition look like?

Me – I feel so passionately about Sam Archer’s vision I nominated hm for the 2014 Bob Hawke Landcare Award. Sam was runner up and like me retired from farming. Does that allow us to have the best of both worlds – inside and outside perspectives?

Social Media can be a blessing and a curse – celebrating the blessings

Last Friday I got to spend 4 hours with the administrator of our local   community’s Facebook page


Jamberoo local Alan Smith ensures our community page is one where kindness is our first priority   

I have been watching this page with awe – somehow or other our community had managed to create something beautiful.  Something the rest of the world aspires to  – Kindness

I had personally benefited from this community so many times – the shock of my beautiful personal trainer deciding suicide was her only option to people rallying when Mr Fox decided my beloved chooks should be feeding his/her/they  family

I had taken in strays, whether its the Kelpie from up the road who thinks the menu is more exciting at my  house to feral cats who either feed themselves on the wildlife or what you have on your verandah.

A fortnight ago I left the door open as I do regularly these days as my orphan shadow is a little bit too grateful I have changed her life and my front and back doors are bearing the brunt of her being left out to discover there was a little red dog in my kitchen eating my cat food.

My tiny little feral friend  hangs on the door till I see her little face 

And he/she/they was still there when I went to have a shower


and we have these interlopers who want what we have – the things that greet you in the shower. The little red dog was definitely less frightening than the python or so I thought. Yes, us people people who live in paradise must learn to live with the wildlife    

I am thinking my beautiful neighbor Robin has a gorgeous  little red dog and she has come to visit but Robin was nowhere to be seen when I went to greet her

So I  let my latest hungry orphan go only to look out the window and see her chasing my chickens. Then the funniest thing happened when my shadows followed me outside to investigate this conundrum

The little red dog became more interested in them. After making sure my chickens were safe I followed the barking.

From the big smile of how my rescue cats took control of this current scenario  I just knew my team had our little community’s  back

They were saying everybody is safe and we are a team

How does this relate to our community Facebook page. I knew I could put this little dog’s picture on our Facebook page and this little dog would be back with its family in 30 minutes

One can hope and dream for great outcomes.

What drives you? I remember too vividly the disaster that was my parents marriage and how my father’s involvement in APEX gave us a short term sense of normality.

The one thing I am truly proud of is when you join the Young Farming Champions  you are part of community that is there for you for life

What is the biggest threat to agriculture in Australia?

What is the biggest threat to agriculture in Australia?

The biggest threat to the Australian agriculture sector is the way the sector talks about itself

We could remind people that Australian farmers supply more than 90% of the food we consume in this country

In these challenging times when ‘food security” could become “national security” almost overnight that makes our farmers very important to every Australian who want to put safe, affordable nutritious food on the table everyday for their families

We could say agriculture is an exciting industry

  • where innovation, disruption and creativity are fostered,
  • where careers with purpose can grow limitlessly.

We could use this language instead we default to using deficit language* and reinforcing the negative

We have some industry bodies who appear to record every negative thing anyone who dares to challenge our environmental and animal welfare credentials says and repeats their list of negatives at every opportunity

This leads to an industry culture of normalising this language and focusing on the problem instead of the solution.

Its leads to our farmers not feeling seen, heard, understood and valued

The language we use has never been more important – lets work together on a common narrative that fosters hope.

*Speaking of deficit language in some sectors the word for resilience has been replaced with anti-fragility. How does the word “anti-fragility” make you feel ?

 

We are all scared sometimes. Understanding why and having compassion is our only choice.

Like many, many people I have been struggling the last few months.

To help me I have reached out to my tribe and done a lot of reading. Its a scary when you read “13 Things Mentally Strong people don’t do” and you realise that you are prime example of how NOT to react.

I run a charity with a wonderful bunch of people. We are all volunteers. When you are doing something that you hope improves the lives of others it helps to get some sort of validation the work you do is having impact.

In a non COVID year our organisation is able to hold events that celebrate the extraordinary things our schools are doing. 

Before those events I usually tag along with our artwork judge the wonderful Wendy Taylor and visit the schools and see in person what they have achieved and how they are changing the world

I realise its this that I am missing so much.  I miss the teachers and students I so miss having Wendy in my life

I know external validation isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s should be combined with internal validation. We need both to be healthy.

How do you ensure your internal validation????

How do you make friends with your feelings ???

How beautiful is this thoughtful piece on COVID and vaccination. And in human connection (ht Nikki Thompson)

The vaccinated people are scared.

They’re scared to get COVID.

They’re scared someone they love might get it and possibly die from it.

They were worried they might not get to travel again or see their international families.

They’re not ignorant or ‘sheeple’ (I loathe that term) – they feel like they’re doing the right thing for themselves and the people around them.

This may not have been an easy choice.

Unfortunately they might have felt obligated to do so.

They might have been scared to get the needle.

While you may not agree with them, it’s important to understand WHY these people have made their choice.

You may think they’re wrong, but I’m sure you’ve felt scared and afraid before.

It feels terrible.

We need to have compassion and empathy for people making a hard choice that’s different than yours.

 

The unvaccinated are scared.

They’re not inconsiderate monsters who thought “I’m going to try to screw over the rest of the people and not get my vaccine.”

They’re worried about long term side affects.

They’re worried about their immune systems.

They’re afraid of how much the government is stepping in on their personal choices, freedoms and rights.

They’re scared they might end up with Bells Palsy, myocarditis, shingles, blood clots, a miscarriage, a heart attack, heart palpitations, profuse unending vomiting, an autoimmune disease activation or death.

They’re worried they might never see their international families again.

It would be easier to get the shot. 

It isn’t easy to say no to the shot.

While you may not agree with them, it’s important to understand WHY these people have made their choice.

You may think they’re wrong, but I’m sure you’ve felt scared and afraid before.

It feels terrible.

We need to have compassion and empathy for people making a hard choice that’s different than yours.

 

This is NOT the time to turn on each other.

It is never the time to do that.

Stop the divide.

Come together with compassion, empathy, understanding, patience and forgiveness.

Take a moment to listen without judgement.

Take time to see where the others are coming from. 

Everyone is doing their best.

Lashing out and placing blame will only make things worse.

Shaming is not the way to change someone’s mind.

Understanding why and having compassion is our only choice.

 

Choose kindness, always ✨

HumanKind. Be Both.

Your value is not the awards you have won it comes from the inspiring a culture of “WE”

When I came back to agriculture twenty years ago I saw myself as a person who could give insights into what was working successfully outside the bubble of agriculture.

What I found was a culture that was more interested in who you were,  who you knew and what you had done than any outside world insights you could bring.

So I went on a journey to prove that I might have something to offer. What that journey told me is its not what you do its what you inspire others to do that matters/

My only regret is I didn’t wake up to that sooner. You can win as many awards as your walls will hold they don’t define who you are or what your legacy could be

Seeking farmers who want to meet and work with next gen consumers!

Building leadership capability is the art of learning how to influence change 

This requires us to join forces to share resources, skills, knowledge and experiences 

We cant do it alone and we cant do it in silos 

As I mentioned in my post “Are you curious about how greater investment in innovative and cost-effective programs will empower farmers?” I breathed a big sigh of relief when I found my tribe and “me” became “we”

What started out as an experiment in innovative ways to connect farmers and the community and support the agriculture sector to be appreciated by every Australian who is able to put healthy, affordable food on the table has morphed into a smorgasbord of opportunities for young people from kindergarten to early career.

Some interesting challenges  have been been posed on our journey.  The Australian agriculture sector doesn’t have an ATTRACT-TRAIN-RETAIN strategy and it doesn’t collect and share data from organisations who work with schools.

In the beginning we were often asked to deliver highly unrealistic expectations like tell us how many young people are now working in agriculture because they did your school programs. That type of reporting requires longitudinal studies that agriculture doesn’t fund. Expectations like this made measuring impact an interesting challenge.

Its has become a lot easier when we have funding partners who are very clear about why they fund us and you can meet their expectations.

For example St Vincent De Paul funds us because they have identified our programs build resilience to natural disasters in young people.

How do you measure that?

Well that’s why the tribe is so important. Experts like Dr Nicole McDonald can build questions into our monitoring and evaluation frameworks to measure “resilience building”

Working with schools is a joy because they tells and show us the impact our programs are having. Our competition judges tell us the impact our programs are having. Our teachers tells us the impact our programs are having.

We recently opened our Expression of Interest for Kreative Koalas and we ask our applicants why they want to participate. A return customer said this

“Having been a previous participant, our school values the opportunity to be involved again and integrate the Kreative Koalas program across all classes in the school. The whole school learning which came about from our previous participation, and the opportunity to connect with industry leading collaborators is something we cannot under value.”

 

The mention of “Industry leading collaborators”  brings me to the big challenge I am yet to surmount. How do we get more of the farmers that we want to build an appreciation for to come onboard. There is an enormous opportunity to involve them and immerse them in our school program experience.

All advice welcome

 

Are you curious about how greater investment in innovative and cost-effective programs will empower farmers?

We are all searching for meaning – to live a life that matters to us and the world around us

Twenty years ago when I was struggling to figure out what that meant for me and I discovered that I was never ever going to be any good at milking cows I went on a journey to find out how I could be use my skills to do some good.

I found the journey never ends as we learn more and more about the world we live in

In 2009 the programs I was designing moved from being  delivered by “me” to “we”.  (Ever grateful to my mentors, coaches, true believers and the very courageous who stand in the arena with me.)

When we started to identify and train young people in the agriculture sector to be the face of our programs and role models of who you can be in agriculture we soon realised we needed to go beyond training them to be confident communicators and trusted voices and support them with all the other things that help develop “human capital”

We began to look at moving beyond skills development, training and education to include more abstract aspects such as self-esteem, empowerment, creativity, increased awareness and mindsets.

When the industry you work in doesn’t have a leadership capacity building framework all we could do was experiment and see what worked and what didn’t.

We also discovered whilst our programs fell into the workforce “Attract-Train-Retain” space, agriculture doesn’t have a workforce strategy either .

Our work has been one big experiment and lots of little ones. We are entering exciting times with increasing interest and invitations to write the story of our journey and publish the learnings from 10 years of collecting unique data sets

We now have a big picture goal to understand how to best support the Australian agriculture sector to develop human capital through a variety of initiatives.

Our farmers increasingly face disruptive changes, including a rise in digital technologies, rigorous food safety requirements, shifting diets, climate change and global pandemics.

Keeping pace with this rapidly changing environment requires farmers to have a stronger capacity to analyse, innovate and respond, while managing their own farm businesses. If we want to transform our agri-food systems to be more productive, sustainable, inclusive and equitable, we need to invest in the people behind them.

Investing in farmers can contribute to autonomy, empowerment and economic development, and is key to successful agriculture and rural development policies.

Yet very little attention has been paid to investing in agriculture human capital over the last decade or so.

In fact less than 3 percent of global agriculture development finance between 2015 and 2018 was invested specifically in strengthening the skills and capacities of agricultural producers.

We look forward to showing how greater investment in innovative and cost-effective programs will result in new technical and business capacities and skills and empowered farmers. This in turn will lead to increased incomes, yields and the inclusion of the previously marginalised groups of indigenous farmers, women and youth .

If this is a space that excites you too – we are always looking for collaborators

#BigGoalBreakthrough