Congratulations to Patricia Eats from The University of Queensland’s School of Veterinary Science, who has recently been awarded an AgriFutures Rural Women’s Acceleration Grant.
The Rural Women’s Acceleration Grant is a new AgriFutures Australia program, developed to foster growth and development in women involved in Australia’s rural and emerging industries, businesses, and communities.
Patricia was rewarded the grant for her work on the development of a social initiative which will champion animal-empathetic workers who are passionate about working in Australian livestock industries.
“It was amazing to know that the AgriFutures team saw the value and importance of my idea and that they were willing to support such an important cause,” Ms Eats said.
“I was aware of the prevalence of poor emotional and mental well-being across animal agriculture industries throughout my earlier life and career, and recognised the need to try do something about that.”
With these factors contributing to an ongoing labour shortages in animal agriculture industries, Patricia felt the need to come up with a way to seek out best-fit agricultural animal care workers while still early in their careers, and seek to improve their capacity for lifelong wellbeing and long-term career satisfaction.
“My social initiative will utilise existing networks to identify candidates who would most benefit from the services offered by it through a nomination process, including self-nomination,” Ms Eats said.
“Ideal candidates are those who demonstrate passion for and conviction to their agricultural animal care roles, and who would stay in the industry permanently or long-term if they could.
“Often we lose good animal people to jobs that offer more recognition and reward, with more secure, stable or sociable hours, and which offer better workplace conditions.
“The goals, ambitions, skills, and interests of each candidate will be used to create a strategy of personal and professional development.
“We’ll do this by using knowledge of existing resources, a community of allied technical and professional mentors and service providers and other training options to best facilitate the selected candidates’ ideal vision of their career.”
The end goal of this ambitious project is to retain the best animal care professionals within the industry, by keeping them in good health, with a clear view of where their careers are heading.
“This will demonstrate the ethic and value that we, as a society, place in having the right people doing animal care work in animal production systems, and broad, positive ripple effects will follow.”
Not one to rest on her laurels, Patricia will continue to promote her social initiative to wider markets, with a book proposal for a broad, consumer audience under development and set for release this year.
“I intend for my social initiative to start in the dairy industry and grow to include all agricultural animal industries, should it become a viable and popularly supported enterprise,” she said.
“My dream is that my initiative will grow and expand beyond Australia, and that we will see many deserving people and communities flourish through the cultural embracement of the value and meaningfulness of the good work of amazing production animal carers.”
