HAVING grown up on an intensive cropping farm in Dowerin, Verity Todd is no stranger to the challenges and opportunities facing the WA grains industry.
So Verity has coupled her love of agriculture with a marketing and communications degree at the University of WA and is now on a mission to enhance the industry's image.
Verity (25), is the marketing and communications executive at AACL, a grain co-production company which underwrites cropping costs for a share of the profits.
She began in the role in September, after spending four years working at Kondinin Group.
Verity is juggling her new role with her Australian Future Grain Leaders Program project, which she has titled How Do I Look?
Over the next 10 months, Verity will investigate how the industry presents itself to those within it and beyond.
She said she wanted to create more positive self-promotion from growers and quash traditional stereotypes.
"A lot of the time we see images of farming or grains when there's bad news, typical things like drought, flood, the extreme weather events," she said.
"It's about ways as an industry that we can really focus on promoting our positive image and the fact that our grain growers throughout Australia are world leaders and are increasingly efficient, effective, adaptive and innovative.
"The grains industry is of historical importance and remains a key industry."
One element she is keen to pursue is the way social media can be used to enhance communication and improve grower profiles.
"It's about lifting our profile and that will in turn promote investment in the industry.
"Adopting a positive image is a challenge that industry has to take on.
"We have amazing growers doing fantastic things but they're not willing to put forward their stories and so it made me think about what the barriers are."
She admitted it could be a challenge educating older growers about the benefits of sites such as Twitter and Facebook but said younger generation farmers were already embracing them.
While she didn't initially imagine she would end up working in the industry she grew up in, Verity said it was an extremely rewarding job with plenty of opportunities for young people.
"The grain leaders project is a fantastic, unique initiative," she said.
"For a young person gaining professional development, it's really exciting.
"In the future I want to focus more on capacity building for industry and already I've seen how much there is on offer in the industry, you could take it as far as you want."
