Local Employment Co-ordinator Gabrielle Keating, second from left, and AACC trainer Troy Baxter, fourth from right, with some of the trainees who received their graduation certificates today  

June 10, 2014

Tuesday was graduation day at Growing The Burnett’s Red Earth Meadows farm at Memerambi.

A second group of would-be small farmers were presented with their certificates following the successful completion of their training course.

All were either unemployed or under-employed when they signed up in March.

The graduates have earned a Certificate III in Rural Operations, a nationally recognised qualification and/or certificates for completing shorter courses in food handling and post-harvest operations.

Growing The Burnett organiser Brian Jarvis praised the graduates for all their hard work.

“You’ve all done exceptionally well,” he said. “It was a tight course and hard to complete time-wise.”

Local Employment Co-ordinator Gabrielle Keating, who presented the certificates, said it had been a really good project that had proved again that investment from the Federal Government can show real results.

She thanked the Australian Agricultural College Corporation (AACC) for getting involved in providing some of the training.

The trainees were mentored on-the-job and a registered trainer from the AACC  visited regularly to take them through the theory side of the course.

The students combined classroom-style learning with hands-on experience in the Red Earth Meadows farm.

Growing The Burnett’s aim as a social enterprise is to train South Burnett residents in small acreage farming so that locals can obtain genuinely fresh, locally grown foods, and people who want to take up horticulture as a career can make a living from it.

However, these graduates are the last ones the Federal Government will fund under current arrangements as the funding program has now been discontinued.

Related articles:

Graduate Helen Anderson presents Growing the Burnett organiser Brian Jarvis with a framed photographic display of the latest group of successful Growing The Burnett trainees

Department of Employment Regional Strategies Manager Derrelle Toumbas and Local Employment Co-Ordinator Gabrielle Keating

Wendy Mogg (Department of Education, Training and Employment) and AACC training co-ordinator Kym Wessling, from Gatton
Brian Jarvis … practising his cooking skills ahead of the new Red Earth Meadows Farm’s Twilight Markets, which start on June 19 in Kingaroy, which will also feature hot “street food”