Catherine Ford graduated with a Bachelor of Agricultural Science in 1994 with an intent to work in landcare or whole farm planning. Catherine remembers the ‘early days’ of the faculty collaborating with industry as a very exciting time.
“While our year group of 20 people was integrated with other science courses for the early years, we had our own space to congregate and socialise (known as the Hovel). We were a pretty close group,” she said.
“A major highlight for me was undertaking a project at the University Farm which involved test pitting soil profile work and assisting the farm manger with various cropping trials.”
After graduating, a short-term job opportunity in a Government Department (now known as the Environmental Protection Authority) changed Catherine's career trajectory into the field of regulating environmental compliance in Tasmania for a couple of years.
Catherine’s career then moved into environmental consulting, working for several Tasmanian owned, multi-disciplinary engineering firms. This work was more in line with her passion of whole landscape management and the bigger picture.
“I specialise in project management, environmental approvals, management, compliance, and reporting work. Environmental consulting is a great field because the projects are diverse, and varied in scale, complexity, and duration,” she said.
“The environmental approval projects require investigation of the existing environment, assessment of the project's potential impacts and determination of suitable management measures; all knowledge that I acquired at university. I specialise in being a generalist!”
Looking back at her time at university, Catherine can now see that the input of her mentors was hugely important in shaping her career.
“The AgSci mentor that I had in my final year at uni was an agricultural consultant. Looking back, he was instrumental in giving me a valuable insight into how I could use my knowledge to help others understand and manage the environment,” she said.
Catherine believes the main challenge for agriculture worldwide is the rapidly changing environment and the sector’s ability to adapt.
“Tasmanian agriculture is uniquely positioned for ready adapt, as agricultural activities here are typically undertaken on a smaller scale to the rest of Australia and other areas of the world. Tasmania's smaller acreages, varied terrain and conditions lend agricultural activities to being specialty small scale and multi-facetted. The challenge is working out how to do this profitably” she said.
“Tasmanian agriculture should continue to build on this as a strength by branding the products as Tasmanian or boutique. Greater investment is however needed into research and development to enable our smaller scale agricultural activities to be less labour intensive and more resilient, and to support establishment of greater value adding opportunities within the State.”
Catherine now works at Pitt & Sherry, an Australian-owned engineering and environmental consultancy firm as a principal environmental scientist.