Ability Agriculture is an online community and not-for-profit that’s working to increase awareness, support, and opportunities for people with disability working in agriculture.
In this blog, founder, agronomist, and disability advocate Josie Clarke tells us more about how the organisation came to be, the role they play in the sector, and the draw of taking a modified gator to agriculture field days.
Tell us how Ability Agriculture came to be.
My family are beef cattle farmers from the mid north coast of New South Wales. When I was young, my dad had a workplace accident that resulted in him becoming a paraplegic.
We had to learn from scratch how to adapt our farm and what we did, from getting automatic gates to making sure we purchased quiet cattle for easier management. He also often couldn’t attend industry events held out on muddy fields. So we were often looking for the next news story to see how we could adapt something for dad on the farm.
For me, disability was something we just didn’t talk about in agriculture. But we were always looking for a community and trying to find out what else was out there. So I thought we could create an online group where we could share what was going on in one space. And that’s how we started Ability Agriculture in 2021.
Today our online community group has around 2,300 members who share pictures or resources of what they’re doing, or even the challenges they’ve experienced. We have a diversity of members and families with various impairments that can now connect and share their experiences and recommendations in one spot.
What challenges are faced by people working in agriculture with a disability?
I think the biggest challenge is misconceptions around the capacity to complete tasks. There are also safety misconceptions: We find that many workplaces are often hesitant to employ a person with an impairment due to safety concerns.
We believe there are supported pathways that can help businesses and persons manage safety and employment. A large part of that is awareness building and workplace training to help employers understand the opportunities and supports that are available when employing a person with a disability or impairment.
I think it’s also really important to emphasise that persons with disability in agriculture aren’t just employees but are also successful agribusiness owners and operators.
Just highlighting the misconceptions and raising awareness can hopefully create a safer and supportive way for a person to feel welcomed into agriculture in whatever role or business they’d like to be involved in.
What direct support do you provide to people working in agriculture that you connect with?
We became a not-for-profit in March 2023. From there we’ve looked at what services are needed for agriculture to help build inclusion and disability confidence.
We have our online community group, which is really important for social inclusion & wellbeing. Having it online helps us reach and connect to persons who are in isolated rural and remote settings.
We often get a lot of questions in our group or email, such as how to adapt a farm for a vision impaired farmer, so we try and find the best resources or ag tech that might be out there.
We also help people find government resources around support, such as the employment assistance fund if they need assistance to modify something for their work.
Can you tell us a bit about the programs you have, like Ability Agcess and Ability AgriCheck?
Agcess and Agricheck are two programs we have developed in the last year that we identified as practical solutions and services that the sector needs.
Agcess is a workplace platform to help support persons connect with a workplace or find work, whether its contracting, work experience, or remote work, and filter for their preferred accommodations. On the other end, Agcess is also built to help agribusinesses easily identify and learn about the accommodations in the roles they advertise.
We’ve often heard stories of persons not wanting to apply for agricultural roles due to the fear that once the employer learns of their impairment, they won’t be chosen for the role. We wanted to help create a platform that can help educate but also create a safe space in recruitment.
Agricheck is our accessibility consultation service where we can help provide planning support and accessibility feedback for agricultural workplaces and events. We just completed an agricheck for the Australian Ausagritech awards to help with the planning of their inclusive event, and increase their accessibility transparency. This included choosing a location where person with an impairment could easily use technology in their pitch to investors for their ag tech. Our Ability Agricheck model is aimed at helping provide feedback and recommendations for improvement, from web accessibility to agribusiness services such as rural store accessibility and staff confidence.
As a not-for-profit, these services are helping us build a sustainable model to help support our scholarship programs such as Ability Agripreneurs (a scholarship connecting persons with disability or impairments who have ideas for accessible agriculture with engineering and business mentors to help design or develop their idea) and our Youth Livestock sponsorship (supporting youth with disability to participate in livestock judging and showing).
What is your proudest achievement or your favourite success story with Ability Agriculture?
A lot has happened in the last year for us. I’d say the most valuable and heartwarming thing is when we are successful in a grant to be able to support us to attend agricultural field days: We take dad’s modified gator and it’s a big conversation starter.
Recently we met Billy and his mum who had travelled from regional Victoria to come and see us at an Ag conference. Billy was 25 and two years into his journey after his accident. Him and his mum wanted to come and check out the gator as Billy was about to get cattle. He was an avid motorbike rider so he was pretty excited to see the gator.
It’s the other rural and regional people we meet that have all been in our position, and just sharing each others experiences–the good and the bad. That’s something that’s really valuable. Hopefully we can help point people in the right direction when they’re feeling a little lost.
What else would you like to achieve?
We’d love to be able to get to a disability conference or show one day to help get the message out and connect to the broader disability community. Often agriculture and disability is something people in the broader community aren’t aware of.
How can individuals and companies get involved?
You can join our online group Ability Agriculture on Facebook or follow us on Instagram at @ability_agriculture.
Our website also has a few different resources, and we’ve just opened up our memberships if anyone might like to join. On our Farm Store for Good, we have some very stylish cotton caps for sale too. If you’re an agribusiness looking for advice or support from the field to the office, our services are listed there.
We also have corporate sponsorships available that enable use to get to more field days and support our community.
Josie Clarke
Josie Clarke is an agronomist, PhD candidate, and passionate disability advocate. She’s on a mission to give a voice to people with a disability, to change perceptions of their capacity to work in agriculture, and create opportunities for them to be involved in the sector they love.
