"I see a lot of potential for the change that's needed in the food system globally and I'd like to be part of that."
Thea Turnbull
Bachelor of Science (Regenerative Agriculture) student
As a part of the unit we have on-farm residentials and field-based studies that are part of the regenerative agriculture courses here at Southern Cross University and part of that is meeting with farmers and practitioners in their fields so students get to see firsthand these practices and principles of regenerative agriculture and best farming practices. So looking at farming systems, working out what's working well and what's not and there really is no substitute for these students to be able to actually get out there, meet their peers, meet people in the industry and key researchers here at the University.
Being able to put names to faces and like ask questions in person with our lecturer is especially good. This morning with the custard apple farm like just learning how he integrates both like conventional practices with best practice and regenerative things like it was really inspiring.
So the regenerative agriculture courses here at Southern Cross University are aimed at students who are interested in pursuing a career in this field and many are already working as practitioners and in some capacity as farmers or in industries that are connected with food – agriculture, broad acre, livestock, production systems.
So I was particularly interested in embracing low-energy means of farming and you know figuring out how to feed people without damaging the earth at the same time.
Just being able to get out there and speak to farmers directly and hear their problems to hear the complexity of the issues that are in that sort of thing. I think quite often a lot of people come to this we're coming from maybe a quite an environmental perspective all that sort of thing and they're quite simplistic models about how things function and maybe solutions seem quite simple to us but in reality they're a lot more complex and it's nice to be able to understand that complexity. And I think we've just been lucky to be exposed to some really innovative farmers.
That's a real strength that we have at the University particularly within this degree students are able to connect with these key farmers and learn core skills that are going to be valuable to them on their farming enterprises and also in achieving the jobs that they want to get in the future.
I see a lot of potential for the change that's needed in the food system globally to happen in the in the farming systems and I'd like to be a part of that. Just basically seeing how things are put together and how and how they work I think is massively important to a lot of people there's only so much you can learn from watching, getting in is really key.
My name is Kane Sadjek. I am the co-founder and CEO of HomeGuardian AI and we're an artificial intelligence company. We were able to create an artificial intelligence driven behavioural analysis device. What we effectively do is analyse human behaviour and alert when there's abnormal and notable behaviour that occurs.
My name is Riley, I'm the technology support officer at HomeGuardian. The first time I met Kane, I hopped off my motorbike and walked inside to the office. I pretty much knocked on the door and the first thing I said was "can you guys give me experience in the industry".
He had a folded-up resume with no technical experience written on it at all. He said "you know I'm just started studying at university I'm willing to work for free to get some experience". We put him on and a week later we had to start paying him because he was doing better than half the employees that had 10 years experience on him. That's the kind of person that I wanted on my team.
I actually lived in a small town called Kyogle. I wanted a break from the rural life to sort of get involved with technology. So I started studying software development at Southern Cross University. I was going to start at Lismore campus but I decided to take a jump towards Gold Coast. That was an awesome change for me and it provided a lot of information and useful tools to get started in a job like this.
Southern Cross University is not only really strong in the technical aspects but at the same time they have a really strong nursing and medical arm as well. So you get somebody who has that multi-discipline exposure in how quickly things change in today's day and age you can't be too structured you have to be able to roll with the punches and that's what we get out of Southern Cross University graduates.
Southern Cross University by far creates the best graduates that are ready to hit the ground running on day one and That's Excellent.