KIRSTY McCormack, OBE organics, may only be 23 years old, but the young leader said her success in the agricultural industry was a mixture of hard work, passion, and drive.
After growing up on a 75ha property only a few minutes out of a small town in New South Wales, Ms McCormack said unlike a lot of the attendees at the Young Beef Producers’ Forum in Roma last week, she did not come from a large grazing background.
But a passion for campdrafting and the rural sector lead Ms McCormack to study a Bachelor of Rural Science, and now she is working for OBE Organics, travelling the world to market Australia’s organic beef.
It was Ms McCormack’s willingness and ability to embrace technology which lead her to be presenting to a room of a young beef producers last week, and she said it was that next generation who would change the way meat is marketed to consumers forever.
“The impact that millennials will have on the international beef trade is astounding,” she said.
As well as her work with OBE, Ms McCormack also runs her own business producing social media content for stock and station agents including posts, videos and photography, and has started her own blog.
She said a willingness to promote your own brand and use the tools social media offers was vital to building any business, including agribusinesses.
Ms McCormack said it was not only Facebook and Instagram which could build client bases, consumer relationships and industry contacts, but LinkedIn, Twitter and a whole raft of other networking sites.
She said it was the next generation who were in a prime position to take hold of the technology available, and start using it to tell their own stories.
“We’re a generation who don’t want to sit down and read facts and figures, we want to hear from individual people, and hear their stories,” she said.
Ms McCormack said she uses a YouTube channel to share short clips about projects she has been working on, and has seen a lot of consumer interest in them.
She said building that relationship was vital to the future of the industry.