The 18 strong cohort will be investigating the company’s Wagyu Pellet Feeding Trial, where the students will monitor the performance of a newly designed stockfeed pellet specifically targeting Wagyu cattle, over a 30-day time frame. Anna Hume is a student participating in the initiative, whose interest in agriculture has been inspired by a strong involvement in her family’s cattle grazing enterprise, dating back 6 generations. “I’ve always loved being involved in agriculture, growing up producing cattle, and I’ve got a horse or 2 at home. It’s always been an interest of mine.” Miss Hume says taking her research out of the classroom and into a feedlot is valuable to her learning experience.

The 18 strong cohort will be investigating the company’s Wagyu Pellet Feeding Trial, where the students will monitor the performance of a newly designed stockfeed pellet specifically targeting Wagyu cattle, over 30 days. Anna Hume is a student participating in the initiative, whose interest in agriculture has been inspired by a strong involvement in her family’s cattle grazing enterprise, dating back 6 generations. “I’ve always loved being involved in agriculture, growing up producing cattle, and I’ve got a horse or 2 at home. It’s always been an interest of mine.” Anna believes taking her research out of the classroom and into a feedlot is essential to her learning experience.

It provides such a good understanding of how the process works, and in terms of the market Wagyu represent, it’s huge. Australia are such big producers of beef throughout the world, so it’s pretty important.” In the future, Anna would like to explore animal nutrition and says the visit to Grassdale Feedlot has exposed the breadth of opportunities available to her. “The fact that there is so many job opportunities in the one place, especially when you can diversify with the [Grassdale] Fertilisers plant, and all the different practices you have in place here, it’s great.” Anna Jahnke is a teacher of Ag and Science and currently Acting Head of Department at Downlands College. Miss Jahnke says after engaging in a number of feedlot tours with Mort & Co, this year saw an opportunity for her cohort to enter the industry as part of their assessment. “The students have done an experiment at the school where we feed our own steers and can work out their daily weight gain, but what this assessment is doing is modifying an experiment on a much larger scale. They can have much more data collected that is going to give them more accurate results that they can then analyse, interpret and apply their understanding too.” The Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority were supportive in the industry partnership, which Miss Jahnke says is very exciting for her students.

Moving forward, Miss Jahnke says she hopes to continue the partnership with Mort & Co. “It would be a great thing to continue to implement. I think being able to give students real experiences and actually apply their understanding in the real-world sense of an actual feedlot trial, as opposed to theoretically what could and couldn’t happen, it would be awesome to maintain the partnership.”