Barry's Vocational Day

Vocational experiences are a very important component of the GSE program. At least once a week, each team member is matched with his/her professional/business counterpart. I was fortunate to begin my day Tuesday leaving the Brisbane area at 6:15am traveling with Rotarian David McCullagh, a nationally recognized cotton and livestock producer and expert on irrigation systems. We drove inland 2 hours to Toowoomba, where I met the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries (DPI&F) National Cotton Extension Training Co-Ordinator Mark Hickman and also Graham Harris, an Irrigation Water Use Efficiency Extension Advisor.
We then traveled for one more hour to Dalby and into farm country that really opens up to very flat land that extends for as far as the eye can see. Traveling with David and I was David Hamilton, who now runs a private agricultural consulting business, farms 640 acres in the area, and now works 3 days a week with DPI&F where he is very well connected as a senior official and with the Director-General (Deputy Minister).
Over coffee we met with Geoff McIntyre who is the DPI&F Irrigation Farming Systems Extension Specialist. From Dalby we drove another 50 kms to Jimbour, stopping along the way to view a working ethanol plant based on sorghum. It was over lunch that David H. and I discussed his plans for a professional visit to North America in the next year, including visits to Michigan State University and the University of Guelph with its applied research and education training outreach programs and the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs extension programs - all for agriculture and rural infrastructure.
I was able to view sorghum harvesting on a huge scale, planting and irrigation systems, sorghum handling, storage and transportation systems, machinery sales yards, as well as the rural electricity distribution grid.
Certainly while traveling together over a space of 12 hours, one can learn and exchange ideas on a very wide range of topics, including the history of the development of agriculture and the rural fabric over the last 150 years or so. And most certainly this can happen at an accelerated rate when you are with widely recognized professional experts who each have a strong sense of agriculture at the international level.
On a side note, I have met at a Rotary meeting the person who was on the very first RI GSE exchange back in 1965 and who has had a career as a tobacco specialist. He actually visited my area of Ontario, Canada after his GSE trip was done in the USA, spending time with the tobacco and cropping specialists who I have known over my time, working with farmers as an extension advisor!

Barry