Region

Canterbury

Job

Georgina (George) is currently an Assistant Resource Care Co-ordinator at Environment Canterbury in Timaru. Her role is to educate and promote sustainable land management practices to landowners and the community. She works as part of team who monitor farms around Canterbury identifying environmental issues and advising farmers on practical solutions to these issues.

George’s focus is to provide farmers and communities with the knowledge and support to ensure that they sustainably manage Canterbury’s natural resources in the long term.

Her job is quite varied varied. She organises volunteer days and has recently held a ‘wilding tree’ day using volunteers from Forest and Bird, local tramping and 4WD clubs to pull out rogue pine trees which are taking over farmland. George is also involved with the Living Streams programme, which Environment Canterbury runs, this programme aims to improve the health and biodiversity of Canterbury’s spring fed, lowland streams. Recently she has been busy organising the Canterbury Ballance Farm Environment Awards field day and awards night.

George enjoys working with proactive farmers who are keen and enthusiastic about improving the environmental sustainability of their faming systems. She says that people tend to be fairly open to suggestion, especially if the suggestions are practical and can be incorporated into their farming systems relatively easily. Landowners can apply to the Environment Enhancement Fund to financial help to subsidize fencing of streams and native bush or for the planting natives.

Being an outdoors person George considers herself pretty lucky that 50 percent of her time is spent away from the office. She is learning things that she would like to apply to her own farm one day.

Career Pathway

George was raised on a dairy farm in Dunsandel, Canterbury where she worked during her summers and holidays. The share-milker on the farm had a Bachelor of Agricultural Science and many of the staff had been through Lincoln University. This is how she became aware of the opportunities available to study agriculture at university.

George enjoyed farming and science, so she felt it made sense to go to university to pursue these interests. She specifically likes the dairy industry and the opportunities it provides to get ahead quickly, as well as the fact that farmers are constantly competing against themselves to improve.

George says: “There are a lot of good things happening within the dairy industry in relation to the environment, and I want to get that out to people. I want to work with farmers and not against them, to help them achieve productive but also sustainable farming systems. There are a lot of sustainable dairy farms and the media presents a really biased picture (against dairying). I want to help improve it.”

She applied for and was awarded a New Zealand Dairy Industry in 2003, her first year at Lincoln University and she has been a recipient for each of her four years at university. She graduated from Lincoln in April 2006 with B.Ag.Sci (Hons).

George was featured in Dexcelink (Winter 2004) as one of the New Zealand Dairy Institute scholarship recipients.

Once George finished her degree she worked at home on the farm for the summer before moving to Timaru to commence work for Environment Canterbury in February 2007.

George eventually would like to go farming, but would like to get to a senior position in her role prior to this.

Interests

Sports – squash, running, tramping, being outdoors, and working at home on the farm!