The Nursery and Garden industry

The Horticulture industries span the productive breadth of Australia and cover the Arboriculture, Turf, Fruit and Vegetable Production, Landscaping, Floriculture, Viticulture industries and the fields of permaculture, biology, botany, entomology, genetics, physiology, landscape design, plant sciences, plant propagation, tissue culture, crop production, post-harvest handling, plant breeding, pollination management, crop nutrition, entomology, plant pathology, economics, and business.

The Production and Retail sectors are comprised of a mix of independent production facilities and interdependent retail outlets and associated industry suppliers that range from broad-scale agribusiness with industry sub-sectors based on crop types and specific fruit varieties, to small scale field grown horticulture, to high-tech protected environment facilities.

The diverse and fragmented nature of the industry has led to specific training solutions providing local and precise issues and simultaneously to high-end auditing capability of biosecurity issues of extreme national importance.

The Nursery and Garden Industry Association of Australia had a long established and comprehensive suite of industry training programs that were popular and well supported by the industry members but the course outcomes had no linkages to the national system of qualifications, and no opportunity of providing a pathway to recognised accreditation.

Recognition was engaged to investigate the uncharted connections and to correlate the professional workshops with the existing national standards.  The construction of a learning outcomes matrix provided the required evidence.

This analysis allowed a successful outcome in mapping the industry training programs to national units of competency and qualifications, to new Skill Sets in Biosecurity and Environmental Sustainability auditing, and a proposed new qualification in Biosecurity Management.