On my farm: Jake Gleeson

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Jake Gleeson’s post-secondary school ‘gap year’ at BCG has been an eye opening experience, and one that will stick with him for many years to come. A great team member, Jake’s work has consisted of soil sampling, sowing, spraying and harvesting trials, taking hundreds of biomass cuts, being an excellent team player and supporting the team during the events season. These tasks are nothing like the work he’s done before on his Watchem chicken farm, but he’s all the better off for the experience to learn more about his mixed farming region. The BCG team wish him all the best with university and his career, but we had to get him to share his story before he departed Birchip.

My family moved from Bacchus Marsh, west of Melbourne, to the farm at Watchem about eight years ago (in 2009).

Before we arrived, my uncle had been producing turkeys and cropping. At this time the property had three sheds which held around 25,000 turkeys and when we changed to chickens you could house 50,000 in the same three sheds. The farm has grown and we’ve added two new sheds giving us the capacity to produce 130,000 chickens every eight weeks.

The main reason for moving to chickens was because the turkey processing company shut down due to a cheaper competitor, so the farm had to change enterprise to survive. After approaching Hazeldene’s, based at Bendigo, with the offer to grow chickens in our sheds, we had to make some alterations. After the adjustments and improvements were made we were able to start producing free range chickens for Hazeldene’s.

While I have lived in Birchip for a long time now and have family that run cropping enterprises, my time at BCG has taught me a lot more about the local agricultural industry. Understanding what is actually involved is something that I definitely know more about now than I did in the past.

I have also really enjoyed the different range of jobs that I have undertaken in the role. Each day is different, who knows what I would be up to.

Birchip has been a great place to go to school, play football and work. The strong sense of community is something that really makes it special. I am sure I will look forward to coming home from Melbourne during the university holidays.

I am moving to Melbourne next week to study surveying at RMIT University in Melbourne. While it will not be farming and probably not directly related to the agricultural industry, there may be some overlap and I will be able to use my farming experience to support my job, for example, when new large scale sheds are being built on-farm.

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