YOUR INDUSTRY YOUNG GROWERS
HORTICULTURE HUGELY REWARDING Words by Helena O’Neill
Molly Green
Working in horticulture is hugely rewarding for Waikato woman Molly Green. The 23-year-old recently began her second horticultural role at Sutherland Produce in Bombay, south of Auckland. “I’m helping with planting, groundwork, and then will follow the crop all the way through. “I enjoy vegetables. I enjoy the fact that you can see your hard work over quite a short period of time. If anything does go wrong then you learn from it pretty fast. And then you get to do it again, you get to have another shot.” Molly graduated from Massey University in 2019 with a Bachelor of Science in Plant Science and Horticulture. She initially began studying veterinary science but found she enjoyed plants a lot more. “I did a paper called biology of cells. We cut up plants and it was super interesting looking at them under the microscope.” After graduating she secured a role in Pukekohe with A S Wilcox & Sons as carrot crop technical support. There she got to learn about and make vital decisions on how best to grow the crop and ran her own trials throughout the country.
“I was doing all sorts. Lots of digging carrots, crop estimates and trials, and a bit of admin. A range of things, but within one crop. I enjoyed it and it taught me how business worked. Something that our degree didn’t really teach as it was more science-focused.” She stayed in that role until December when she took up a position in operations and projects with Sutherland Produce in Bombay in Waikato. “Being with growers like Wilcox and Sutherland, they have different crops so you get to dabble in more than just one crop. I’d rather be a general person than a one-crop specialised person.” Horticulture skills are very transferable which gives plenty of job options, she says. “Having that base understanding of plants from my degree I can ‘guesstimate’ reasonably well what is going to happen when I do something. “If you’ve been in horticulture for a little bit, it’s not retraining, it’s getting more advanced in something. Because those skills are so transferrable, you can go into something and after a month you have picked it up because you already have that base understanding. “That’s the awesome thing about horticulture – you can switch and change.” Working in horticulture is very rewarding, Molly says.
30
NZGROWER : FEBRUARY 2021
