MorePeople are proud sponsors of the new Cultivate your Future Podcast! A great new initiative to showcase the wide variety of careers available in horticulture, hosted by Horticultural Business Consultant, Neville Stein.
We asked the team what inspired them to start up;
“The principle behind this is that podcasts are a great way of educating and informing young people and career changers about the opportunities that the “hidden world” of horticulture holds.
For many, horticulture (or gardening as it’s so often described) just means planting in fabulous show gardens at historic houses, or people planting row and row of flowers and vegetables and assuming it is low-paid laborious work.
What you rarely see are the images of the “hidden world” of horticulture, of growers walking up and down high-tech greenhouses with iPad’s controlling the environment, of huge warehouses growing vertical edibles or plant pathologists or entomologists working in labs to identify disease and insect problems. You rarely witness plant breeders working with advanced plant genomic techniques to develop new strains that are better adapted to climate change, or agronomists advising growers on soil management and IPM, or orchard managers piloting drones to assess fruit harvest yield potentials or garden centre trainees working their way through the organisation and often ending up running garden centres employing hundreds, or the myriad opportunities across the broad horticultural sector and its allied industries – from garden centres through to landscapers, growers of trees, nursery stock, bedding and container plants, soft and top fruits, suppliers of products ranging from growing media and seeds through to gardening tools and plant food. Many of these businesses are turning over hundreds of millions of pounds and need not only horticultural skills but sophisticated managerial skills, so attracting the best and the brightest to the industry is a hugely important goal.
The goal of the podcast is therefore to act as an inspirational and educational tool that will provide students with insights into the multi-faceted career opportunities available within the sector.”
You can expect to be listening to short, interview style sessions with people in the industry talking about their own experiences, how and why they took their chosen career path and what opportunities are available in their specific sector.
The first two episodes are out now with Michael Perry AKA Mr Plant Geek, and with our very own Horticulture Team Manager, Sarah Want!
