“This is the food bowl of Sydney and without it, Sydneysiders will be paying through the nose for everything,” University of Western Sydney Hawkesbury alumni chairman Anthony Martin said.
Mr Martin believes the university’s decision to suspend its agriculture course this year has been a “slow gradual death brought about by more than just national trends”.
Mr Martin, a former UWS Hawkesbury student, said the course has gradually been wound down since the inception of the principal university about 20 years ago.
“The UWS structure does nothing to foster the land sciences and this has been an ongoing problem for years,” Mr Martin said.
With the cost of basic foods becoming more and more expensive, Mr Martin said it will only get worse when it’s all foreign-owned.
“If we don’t get people back into agriculture, we’re building a rod for our own backs and if we don’t have people going into these industries we will be exporting these jobs and importing workers.”
According to the Dean of the School of Science and Health Professor Gregory Kolt, demand for the agriculture programs at UWS has been decreasing for a number of years in line with national trends.
Mr Martin also believes this is the case but said the course had been let down by the university itself.
“There’s no doubt that it’s become a bit of a cargo culture where people tend to see what’s trendy at the time or in vogue,” he said. “The rise of things like crime scene investigation (CSI) programs brings to attention things like Forensic Science, which I guess because of the way it is depicted on TV is seen as attractive. Agriculture and food production hasn’t been seen as an attractive industry and in fact most young people probably are unaware of where eggs, milk and bread come from.”
Mr Martin said it was upsetting to see that a university which once focused on food and agriculture was now more focused on promoting everything but what it stands for.
“One of the biggest problems this campus has is that it is a ‘land-rich campus’,” he said.
“There have been calls over time to get rid of and sell off the land to make money, and if you look at what the university board was once made up of, more than half of them were property developers so you have to question their interest. Eventually there will be a land grab and I have no doubt there would be people sniffing around already to carve it up.
“The staff here can’t just sit back and be silent about this.The university promotes almost nearly every other course except agriculture and over time there’s been a gradual drain of courses out of this campus. Land Economy was one. This was probably one of the most successful property business courses, and it was taken away. The resources that have been put into agriculture have been limited and this is an inevitable result.”
Mr Martin said people needed to stop looking at the short-term benefits and instead focus on the long term.
“Agriculture is needed to feed people; coal doesn’t feed people. People tend to just look at the short term and think ‘I can walk out and become a law graduate for $80,000 a year or do agriculture for $40,000’. It’s a slower process but like anything, if you do it well, there’s good money in it.”
Meanwhile, the university acknowledges the vital importance of agricultural graduates and will be consulting industry experts and other stakeholders to investigate ways to teach agriculture in the 21st century.
“There’s plenty of hope and plenty of jobs out there,” Mr Martin said.
“We just have to get out to our alumni and supporters to keep the history of this campus alive. This is a fundamental shift problem and not something you can change easily. But if we’re not proactive in the next year, it’s pretty much the end of it.”
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