Historic top spot for Karina

As a fresh-faced cohort of first-year students embark on their agriculture studies at UCD, they are not alone in starting a new chapter. Their school head, Karina Pierce, is also embarking on a ‘first year’ of her own. Although she has been an academic staff member of the School of Agriculture and Food Science for 19 years – as well as a graduate before that – she has just commenced her first of a five-year term in the top spot at the school. And, while she says it is a bit daunting as ‘there are a lot of expectations with the role’, she is really excited about what is to come.

Career Journey

Karina’s career journey so far has seen her reach many milestones across academia, research, and leadership areas. But her interest in agriculture was really nurtured from her earliest years at home on the family farm in Roundwood, Co. Wicklow, with her late father, mother, and four siblings. “I grew up on a farm of 60 acres, so it was a small farm, but there were five of us reared on it,” she says. “We had beef and sheep on the farm in a very rural area a few miles outside Roundwood; so, a harsh part of the world to farm in.
“We saw good years on the farm and we saw tough years, and when you are at that scale – 12 to 15 suckler cows and around 150 ewes – you are very vulnerable,” she explains. Her mother worked from home as a seamstress, and Karina recalls the big Singer sewing machine in the kitchen; a symbol of a strong work ethic required to make the economics of the family farm work, and to rear five children on it. “It was a busy house, but a great spot to grow up, and I loved it,” says Karina.

Passion for Education

Karina loved it so much, she says, that she was almost six when she started school. “I just couldn’t be moved out of the place,” she laughs. While Karina may have preferred the great-outdoors life of farming to the classroom in her very, very early years, once she started, another passion was soon formed – education: agricultural education, to be precise. Completion of her third-level studies saw her graduate from UCD with a Bachelor of Agricultural Science (BAgrSc) and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in animal nutrition. She has conducted research on sustainable dairy-cow production systems spanning grassland management, dairy-cow nutrition, greenhouse gas emissions, and farm profitability. She worked her way consistently along the academic ladder reaching the post of programme director of the BAgrSc Dairy Business programme and also held the role of director of external relations, leading strategic engagement with industry, Government, and alumni at the School of Agriculture and Food Science. This latter role, Karina says, saw her work closely with her predecessor, Professor Frank Monahan, outgoing dean of agriculture and head of the school. This gave her a great insight into the role, she says.

Historic appointment

In handing the reins to Karina, Frank referred to her appointment as an ‘historic’ one. She is the first woman to be appointed to the role. In what is both the 100th anniversary of the School of Agriculture and Food Science at UCD, and the International Year of the Woman Farmer, Karina notes the significance. “You’re there to do a good job regardless of gender, and I think that’s the most important thing. But I have noticed that, certainly, being the first woman in the role does garner attention. So many women in the industry have come up to me and commented on it being such a positive thing. So, I suppose, I try not to think about that too much, but it is obviously significant. This industry has traditionally been very male dominated, so [since I started in it] I’m kind of forging a path or working along that for my whole career.”

Communication

Karina recognises the importance of participation and communication when it comes to creating awareness of what is happening at the School of Agriculture and Food Science, and why it matters. In the agri-industry, Karina is very well known and respected because she understands – and acts on – this, and it is something that she wants to further promote in her new role. She explains: “I’ve always been really interested in the school of agriculture being outward facing; being out and about in industry. Because there’s a lot of knowledge in the school, and that knowledge is only of value when we are communicating it out there. So that’s something I’ve tried to do; to be very involved in industry, because I see the benefit of that and, hopefully, over the next five years in my term, I will encourage many others in the school to do the same. There’s a huge and really capable team of academics and researchers in the school. They have really prominent and important roles on lots of committees and boards, so we do contribute across the industry, but I think I’d like to see us doing it a little bit more.”

Priorities

There are other priorities on Karina’s list for the coming five years and the first area she touches on is artificial intelligence (AI). “In academia, there can be a negative connotation to AI, but actually – and it's so evident when I'm talking to companies – AI is being used every day in every walk of life now, and we need to equip our students to be ready for the working world.” This lines up with a second aim, Karina explains, and one which highlights the importance of the School of Agriculture’s alumni network. “That is to work really closely with industry over the next number of years because industry is doing this [AI] on the ground, today. We have so many industry partners, alumni and graduates who are willing to work with us and help us. So, we lean into that.” As well as approaching AI via the curriculum, she explains that it would also be addressed, preferably, through student work placements and industry-led talks to students. “You may not be 100% up to speed with AI because you’re a researcher in animal nutrition, for example. And while that is a hugely important part of what we do, our students need other skills as well, so those kinds of industry interactions are going to be really important.” Another area of importance, Karina highlights, is the need to equip graduates with robust communication skills so they can articulate their expertise. Karina explains that the school has collaborated with industry on  this to introduce a communications-focused lectureship initiative, co-funded by UCD alongside the Our Food Roots initiative. Karina says: “Our graduates have a really important role to play in that because while they’re agricultural scientists, they will need to be able to communicate effectively.” This, she agrees, is more important than ever as the spotlight intensifies on the agriculture sector around emissions and its environmental impact.
“Another area I’ve been really looking at is that of entrepreneurship and innovation,” says Karina. “There are so many challenges for the agricultural sector, and I don’t think we see enough of our graduates coming out to solve those problems. But then I had to ask myself, where are we giving them the opportunities to be creative, to think, to problem solve, to come up with solutions or innovations?” Karina has been seeking the answers to these questions and, she says, there will be developments in this area in the coming year or so.

Campaign impact

Our Food Roots features further in our conversation, based on its recently launched campaign titled ‘We Make Greatness from Grass’, which coincided with the results of a body of research that it also carried out. The unique campaign centres on an original hip-hop-inspired song and music video. It is a departure, for sure, from your regular farming-related communications, but the research released by Our Food Roots alongside it showed a ‘need to find new and relevant ways to build connection between younger audiences and the food they eat, where it comes from and the people behind its production’ the entity said.
Karina comments: “The awareness of agriculture is poor, and there are statistics telling us that a great number of kids now have never been on a farm, and that is something that has changed hugely over the last few generations, where everybody had an uncle and aunt, a granny or a granddad who came from a farm.
“It’s our job now to educate the general public about farming and I think that’s what those kinds of campaigns are doing. There have been mixed views, I would say in the farming community about it. But what I would say is that it is not for me; it is not for farmers. It is for a a younger demographic, a cohort that has no real interest in agriculture, or one that maybe sways a little bit towards the negative.”
Hot on the heels of this campaign, the National Dairy Council launched its own titled ‘A True Irish Legend’, also coinciding with new research that it says ‘highlights a generational gap in connection with Irish dairy’. Bord Bia also recently launched a domestic beef campaign aimed at younger Irish shoppers. Such campaigns are integral in communicating to target audiences about our agricultural sector, says Karina: “What they’re saying is we have a really important industry here in Ireland, we have a grass-based industry, which is really different, and that it’s in our DNA and we should be proud of it. While I’m not denying that there are challenges, and we have to deal with those challenges, own up to them, and deal with them, it is something that we can actually be really proud of. I suppose that’s what I see in those campaigns.”

Karina references the role of Agri Aware in this space also and the work that it does with primary and secondary schools. It is necessary work, she says: “Most of them are doing agricultural science [in secondary school], but a lot of them don’t have a background in farming. So, farmers opening their farms, us speaking to school students more, educating people from when they’re small right up, I think that is something that we need to do, and I think the whole industry is starting to buy into that.”