We congratulate the first 18 graduates of the Professional Diploma in Dairy Farm Management who completed their diploma this week. The course was established in 2012 on the recommendation of the Food Harvest 2020 implementation group.

However, the numbers being trained to manage farms is far too low for an industry with ambitious growth plans. The Food Harvest implementation group set a target of 100 trained farm managers per year.

The fact that becoming a qualified farm manager is a four-year process – two years of college followed by two years of paid internship on farms – means that the vast majority of students are keeping their options open by selecting Level 7 and Level 8 agricultural courses that can be completed in the same time period.

The right terms and positive feedback from peers should, over time, attract at least some of these young people into farm management. Not all will have the particular mix of skills required.

Perhaps the industry needs to organise a roadshow to encourage at least some to consider farm management as a career.

One of the factors hindering recruitment is that, in the past, some well-trained farm managers have struggled to develop a career path here.

Quota abolition will change that, but an additional challenge is that we now have to compete for talent globally – the advertisements in this paper demonstrate that Irish farm managers are also in demand in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia.