Late last year I had the pleasure and privilege of attending the Collingwood Area School (CAS) senior prizegiving ceremony. I was there representing Federated Farmers, to present the Golden Bay Federated Farmers Agriculture Award.
We are very proud to have sponsored this award since 2017. I presented a trophy and a prize of an Estwing hammer to the winner, Year 13 student Ben Martin who I have only re-cently caught up with to ask him about his journey.
Ben grew up in Wellington and attributes the kindling of his interest in farming to visits and holidays spent at his grandparents’ farm in Hawkes Bay.
Ben’s family later moved to Nelson, and at age 13 he continued to seek out opportunities wherever possible to work on the land. He left school at the end of Year 11 to go into full time employment but then moved to Golden Bay and decided to head back and finish his schooling at CAS.
While there, Ben made the most of the Gateway programme to get out on local farms, and he also did relief milking and other farm work out of school time. At the end of his Year 13, Ben was asked by one of the farmers he had worked for, if he would like a full-time job after he finished school. He now works for Jason McBeth in Rockville.
Ben has a real love of farming, and says he gets a lot of satisfaction looking back over the work he has achieved for the day. He has a keen interest in animal genetics and breeding and would like to one day have a stud farm.
Federated Farmers is proud to be recognising and supporting young people in agriculture in New Zealand, and the past eight years of sponsoring this award at CAS has been a re-sounding success.
Given this success, we decided to make a similar trophy to be presented to a student with agricultural aspirations studying at Golden Bay High School. Sadly, that award has sat and gathered dust for the last four years, as there hasn’t been a student deemed by the school as fitting the award criteria. We find this both alarming and worrying. It is a sad state of affairs if, in a rural community such as ours that we have very few young people aspiring to work in the broad scope of agriculture and it is something we must look to rectify for the future of our industries.
We need more Ben Martins’ – he will be an asset to our farming community.
