The pursuit of science before happiness

BY JON MORGAN - FARMING EDITOR

Massey University's agriculture director became a scientist to save the world, and it's why she's still a scientist. 

Don't tell Jacqueline Rowarth you're going to university to have fun. The slender, energetic agriculture professor with the articulated rounded vowels of a well-travelled Royal Navy upbringing doesn't believe in fun, not for science students, anyway.

"Look at this." She points to a blackboard in her cluttered office at Massey University's Palmerston North campus.

Words are chalked in a rough circle. In the centre is "water polo", beneath it "fun and enjoyment". On an outer edge are "chemistry, physics, maths".

"This is a girl. Her father brought her to me. She's 17, a bright girl, and she wants to be the water polo manager for New Zealand. It's all about sports, fun and enjoyment."

She sighs. "It took me ages to find her skill base. I told her, 'You're 23, someone's knocked you over at the pool, you've cracked your head open and you're not going to swim again. Where's your skill base?' I get, 'Oh, that won't happen'.

"We did manage to get chemistry in there, because the coaching business is nutrition, which is chemistry, and I hope she will pull back to it."

She sighs heavily, shakes her head and mutters disgustedly, "Fun and enjoyment".

But didn't she want fun and enjoyment at that age? "No," she says firmly. "That was for after school."

It's relevant to a point she returns to often - the emphasis at schools and in tertiary studies on creative and performing arts, rather than the sciences. "We get children who have done drama, art, photography and, oh dear me, media studies, who say they want to come and work with animals."

Her voices rises in exasperation. "Where's biology, chemistry, physics, maths and English - that's what they need."

She has a restless enthusiasm and with an expressive face and an actor's voice that she uses to great effect, it would be no surprise to learn her classes in soil and plant science generate enough fun and enjoyment to hold the most wayward student's attention.

It is clear she is closely involved with her students.

Since taking up her roles as the foundation chair of pastoral agriculture at Massey and as the university's director of agriculture, with the emphasis on promoting agriculture, in 2007, she has instituted a late-Friday meeting for the students with key industry people.

These "professional development workshops" are designed to show the students what opportunities await them. "They dress and behave appropriately, they get an idea about networks and they make connections. And it works. They come up to me so excited, all pink and shiny. It's so sweet."

She is careful to draw a line. "I won't do the work of making these connections for them. It's up to them whether they come or not, but if they do, there's these rewards." It is her way of showing the students that hard work can pay off.

After a childhood travelling the world with her navy officer father, she is no stranger to hard work.

She describes it as "Royal Navy noblesse oblige".

"I was brought up to use my ability to help others."

She asks the next question herself. "Why agriculture? I wanted to save the world."

She still believes in that. "That's why I'm here," she says. "It's about environment and people; how to feed people sustainably."

She is a vegetarian, making the decision to stop eating meat at 18 after coming home from rearing calves and feeding piglets on a work-experience organic farm to find her mother had cooked veal and ham pie for tea.

Vegetarianism won't save the world, she admits. Neither will organics. But she is doing her bit, driving a diesel car, holidaying at home and turning down invitations to conferences in Europe. "It's too silly. How many tonnes of carbon would that use?"

She emigrated with her family at 19 and studied at Massey, gaining an agricultural science degree with first class honours in environmental agriculture and going on to complete an award- winning PhD in soil science.

Many other awards have followed, including being named a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2008.

She has little spare time, travelling, constantly, it seems, around New Zealand to talk at everything from international conferences to school prizegivings.

She teaches, tutors, keeps up with the latest research, marks papers and still has time to conduct her own research.

In her student days she was involved with the drama club and was finally forced to make a choice between acting and study when it came time to write her PhD paper.

"The repertory society was auditioning for Lady Windermere's Fan and I quite wanted to be Lady Windermere. But I decided I was committed to science, because you can't do science part time."

She still has a tinge of regret that she turned her back on the stage. "But would I feel as happy as I do now? I really like my students. I love seeing them come in from the schools and then three years later they're crossing the stage as proper people. I really like that, I do."

Her students are from Generation Y. They have to learn that happiness is not a normal human condition and must be worked for, she says.

"We've given them confidence and we want them to be happy, and I think that might be the worst thing we've done.

"It's given them the expectation of happiness, but happiness is not a normal human condition. You have to work at it."

She describes this as the quarter-life crisis. "Suddenly, their teachers aren't there and their parents don't think they should be there and they don't know what to do."

The emphasis should go back on to hard work. "Instead of saying, 'Well done, darling, you're so clever', it should be, 'Well done, darling, you must have worked so hard'. That way they will want to work hard again."

The way the baby boomers have raised their Generation Y children is to blame. The baby boomers have meant well, and she emphasises she is not criticising them. At 54, she is a baby boomer herself, although she has never married and is childless.

"It's about guilt," she says. "When women started going out to work, they felt guilty at leaving their children, so they started to compensate by buying them presents. Now we have this focus on the external, which leads to less satisfaction in work and in life."

Generation Y children have ended up being rewarded for participation, not achievement.

"It starts at primary school, when they're playing sports. Nobody wins any more. They muddle up the sides every few minutes."

This is now being felt by the next generation, Z, or, as she calls them, Zappers, aged under 17.

The emphasis is on rewards and fame. Recent research in Britain suggested that the preferred career option for 32 per cent of 14 to 18-year-old girls is model and for 29 per cent it is actress. In the United States, more girls would rather be a model than win a Nobel Prize. "That's a terrible, terrible signal to have given to them."

It is the same in New Zealand, and the education system, with its emphasis on "after-school" studies, does not help. She quotes from Victoria University research into NCEA level 3 achievement.

"If you are a good student, achieving high marks, you can do anything. If you are not, you will fail science and engineering. But you have a 75 per cent chance of passing an education degree and a 65 per cent chance of passing creative and performing arts. That's terrible.

"Some of the bright kids think, 'Shall I stick with the hard stuff and have a grotty life or shall I go and explore my creative side', and remember, their parents have been encouraging them, saying, 'You're so creative, darling'.

"Then they have the quarter- life crisis. 'The education conveyor belt has dumped me,' they say. They find there are no silver-screen jobs."

Her aim is to make science and maths matter and she thinks that, once convinced of it, the need the Ys and the Zs have for instant reward can be held at bay.

She wants the Government to fund "offsetting" scholarships that, at a cost of $15,000 each, will keep them studying.

"Science students don't have the spare time to hold down a job. The thing that makes people happy is not money - as long as they have enough to live on - it's being able to make progress in the right direction. They need to see they're going to be valued."

She has a simple exercise for her first-year students that shows them the value of the jobs they could end up in. She asks the class to put their hands up, and then to lower them if they or their parents were born by Caesarean section, or they had their appendix, tonsils or adenoids out, had had an asthma or anaphylactic attack, had broken bones, or had mumps or rubella, had a tetanus jab, or had to take penicillin.

"At the end, a third will still have their hands up and I'll say, 'Congratulations, you're still alive'.

"I'm making the point that science - medical intervention - has made a difference in their lives and that through science we've produced enough food to feed the vast numbers of the world population. We're producing more food per unit of water and nitrogen than before. We're feeding more people to a better state of nutrition.

"When I was growing up, we were feeding three billion people and had 25 per cent that were starving. Now we've got seven billion people and a problem with 19 per cent. The numbers underweight and starving are balanced by those overweight and obese. I tell the students, 'This is why you are highly in demand'."

It is also why their salaries will be higher, she says. The average salary for a graduate six months out of a BA degree is $33,800. Her science graduates are on more than $40,000 and the total package, with a car and other perks, takes that to $55,000. That will lift to $80,000 five years further on, 40 per cent behind Australia.

Although agriculture science graduate numbers still remain pitifully low, just 80 in the whole of New Zealand last year out of total university graduates of 19,500, she is attracting more students.

For example, when she started in 2007, first-year plant science numbers were 67. This year they are 115. "It is an indication that we've recruited well," she says. "Part of it is the dairy boom and part awareness of the importance of agriculture."

These students are taught how to think their way clearly through a problem, how to weigh up knowledge and carefully reason their way to a decision.

"What I hope is that they are able to go out there and make a difference in their thinking and their approach. They can help New Zealand move to where it should be, which is sustainably producing food that is validated, verified and authenticated so we can show it has less impact in greenhouse gases, nitrogen and phosphorous than any other country."

She hopes she has made a difference in the way they now look at life. "When I first went to university, my lecturer told us, 'Look right, look left. Only one of you will be here next year'. I thought that was so depressing. This is what I say to the first-time students, 'Look right, look left. These are your friends for life'."

'If modern food is so bad, how come we are living longer?'

Jacqueline Rowarth has firm views on many subjects, most backed by research. Her axiom is: Stick to facts, evidence and data. But it does not stop the hate mail coming in, Rowarth says.

Dirty dairying: We have better water quality than any other dairy country, but that's not what we hear. If everyone says the dairy business is bad because of environmental pollution, we won't get good people coming into it. I hate it when New Zealanders slag each other off. Marketing research shows word of mouth is really important, so let's keep our mouths clean and green.

Organics: It takes up twice as much land; it is not the future. When the recession hit British supermarkets, organic food went from two bays to half a bay. The public made its choice on price. Organic farmers say they use fewer sprays, but they do spray with copper sulphate. Sulphur and copper are high in organic food; do I regard that as a benefit? No.

Biological farming: Soil carbon is good, they say. I agree, but you can have too much. They say "it feeds the bugs". I'm fine with that. "That makes healthy plants and animals". Eh? Possibly. "And that makes healthy food . . ." I'm struggling a bit here . . . "with nutrient density . . ." and I'm really struggling ". . . which makes healthy people and we can cure cancer" and I'm off the wall! I keep coming back to: where are the facts, the data?

"Nutrient-dense" food: It's not the growing that's the problem, it's what people eat. We add value to the foods we grow; it's called fat and sugar, and then we sell it. Don't blame the food. If modern-day food is so bad for us, how come we are living longer?

Genetic modification: I think we ought to investigate it. Speaking as a vegetarian, I was pleased when rennet stopped coming from calves' rumens. It's a GM yeast or bacterium now. We've been eating it since the 1990s and we haven't turned into anything strange.

Pig welfare: If Mike King is shaking a bucket and waking them up at 3am, well, of course they scream. The public reaction lasted three weeks in the supermarkets. People make choices.

Meat industry: Reform is in farmers' hands, it's up to them to do the voting. Zespri and Fonterra are regarded as a major problem for other New Zealand companies wanting to get into their markets. Jolly good, is all I can say. Let's have more of those.

Women: I hear "We need more women on boards". No, we need more good people on boards; some of them will be women. I don't believe in positive discrimination.

- © Fairfax NZ News