SOCIAL activities are not always easy for young people to come by in rural WA, but if Kojonup’s Caroline House and Sophie Forrester have their way, that won’t be the case for long.
The duo is a driving force behind the Southern Dirt Young Farmers Network’s (SDYF) Kojonup branch, which has already been a success since its formation more than six months ago.
SDYF is facilitated by grower group Southern Dirt, which recognised the need for a network to connect, support and educate the next generation of rural youth.
Southern Dirt joined forces with Southern Forest’s Young Farmers network in Manjimup, and approached Caroline to get the ball rolling in Kojonup in October last year.
With the help of Sophie, a SDYF committee of nine was established.
“I guess that’s our main aim, to act like a support network but also just a general group of like-minded people that can come together and hang out,” Caroline said.
“All youth in regional areas are welcome, we sort of obviously target farmers and agricultural professionals but really just anyone who has anything to do with keeping a community like this going.”
Caroline juggles her role as committee chairperson with her full-time job as an accountant at Pascoe’s Accounting and Advisory in Kojonup, while living on her mixed-enterprise family farm west of town.
She spent much of her childhood in Kojonup and attended the local primary school before becoming a boarder at St Hilda’s School in Perth and studying accounting and business law at The University of Western Australia.
Caroline returned to Kojonup last year and identified a lack of social opportunities for young people living and working in the region.
“I think especially for young people coming back from university, and those that have been away at school, you don’t really know anyone in the area,” she said.
“If you don’t play sport and if you don’t work in a workplace where there are young people, you don’t know anyone.”
Luckily she had childhood friend Sophie, who also returned to Kojonup after five years boarding at Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Perth.
Sophie has been working on the family’s sheep farm west of Kojonup full-time for two and a half years, since completing a business apprenticeship and a Diploma of Agriculture.
The pair spearheaded SDYF’s inaugural event last November – a pre-harvest sundowner.
“We quickly organised a sundowner last year, that was literally in the first couple of weeks that we started up and we got about 30 or 40 people to that so that was really exciting,” Sophie said.
“What we’ve found is young people want something to do on weekends, they want to meet young people down here, they don’t want to have to go to Perth.”
In March SDYF held its next big event, attracting more than 120 people for a sundowner at Qualeup.
“The Qualeup sundowner was a huge success, I think it just really made people want more,” Sophie said.
“The events have been great, you find all of these people that are cooped up on farms that are your neighbours and you’ve never met them.
“We’ve had lots of parents and people come up and say it’s so good that you’re doing this because otherwise they would never go out.”
While boosting social opportunities for those in the country, SDYF also prioritises organising educational events, tailor-made for the specific needs and interests of the next generation of young farmers.
The committee has entered a team into the Southern Dirt Cropping Challenge, and is in the process of planning a men’s health workshop, a women in agriculture event, an educational wine tour and a wool producer’s workshop.
“I think that a wool producer’s course is something that young people and young farmers really need and want to understand – what appens to our wool, where it goes, the process, marketing strategies and all of those sides of things,” Sophie said.
“A lot of the older farmers, they already know all of that stuff and I think when you’re learning off your parents it’s a lot harder to get them to sit down and spell it out for you,” Caroline said.
“Our main events are social but we have been trying to set up a few educational events that are specific to the interests of younger people and the next generation of farming.”
They are now planning the SDYF Winter Wonderland Ball, a black-tie event on Saturday, July 8.
With plenty of positive feedback and overwhelming support from the Kojonup community, they hope it will be their most successful event yet.
Looking further to the future, the dynamic duo has big plans for SDYF and hope to spread the network across the State.
“For the next two years I guess we’ll be mainly just focusing on the Great Southern area but ideally it would be great to spread it out into the Wheatbelt and up north,” Caroline said.
“We hope that it could work everywhere, we’re definitely keen to get something going up in the Wheatbelt because I think they need it even more than us because we do have such a thriving young community and there’s just a bit more distance between farms up there,” Sophie said.
“The social side of things is so important, it’s probably the most important thing to keep these little towns alive.”
With a friendship spanning more than 20 years, it seems Caroline and Sophie are a key ingredient to SDYF’s rapid success.
“We’ve known each other since we were babies, so that’s been nice her coming down here as an accountant and being able to create the group together,” Sophie said.
“Caroline is very good with her accounting and all of the numbers and everything, whereas I probably have a bit more of a feel for a bit more of the agricultural side of things and what we need and what we want educationally.”
“We’re both quite practical people so it works well, we both have the same aim and mindset of where we want it to go and how we want it to turn out.”
For more information about the Southern Dirt Young Farmers Network see:
More information: SouthernDirtYF on Facebook or southerndirt.com.au /young-farmers