As Easter approaches it’s the time of year when we welcome placement students onto our farm and into our home, to help with the flurry of pre-breeding tasks – vaccinating, metri-checking, applying tail paint and disbudding calves.
Unfortunately, after nearly 10 years of offering placements, we’ve had our first negative experience.
It involved underage drinking and the usual side-effects, resulting in the students being sent home and me spending an afternoon cleaning carpets.
See also: How to get the best from your vet student at lambing
With people still wary of inviting people into their homes after Covid, and ever-increasing awareness of health and safety risks, it would be very easy to just say no to hosting students.
Perhaps it’s more trouble than it’s worth and we would be better to just focus on covering the workload from within the existing team.
But when I go back through the numerous individuals we have met over the years, the overwhelming majority have been a pleasure to have around.
We have had vet students from most of the main universities, French agriculture students on language placements, and students from local ag colleges.
From the bookish Cambridge student who turned out to be a dab hand at disbudding, to the amateur dramatics enthusiast who sang to the calves as she fed them, the French girl who baked amazing pies with the apples from our garden, or the French boy who invited us to visit his family vineyard in Burgundy, all of them brought something unique to the farm.
We even had students staying with us when both of our children were born.
They helped us get through the work and by doing simple things like fetching the cows in and out for milking, so we had a little bit more time together as a family.
Recently, we have had a local man coming to the farm for work experience on the weekends. He was looking for a career change into agriculture and wanted to learn some basics.
He would help to bed up calves and quiz me all the while on our pathway into farming, what skills he would need, how much capital he would have to save, what training courses he should go on.
Unfortunately we didn’t have a vacancy in our business, but I suggested some places to look for jobs, and last week he accepted a place on a dairy training programme.
The feeling of satisfaction to have helped him in a small way is wonderful.
Similarly, when the guy who had worked for us since he was 17 and with no farming experience told us he had been offered a herd manager job, we were genuinely proud and pleased for him, because we knew we had helped him to get there.
In our farming careers, lots of people have given us their time, showing us around their businesses, sharing resources, providing a listening ear.
I like to think that by offering placements we are passing that generosity forwards.
I also think that you never know where it may lead – maybe in a few years’ time that trainee will come back and apply for a herd manager job with us.
With labour continuing to be such a challenge on farms, we all have a duty to try to help develop the next generation.
So I won’t let one bad experience put me off. I’m already looking forward to welcoming the next pair of students when we start calving again in the autumn.
