Guy Barnett,Minister for Primary Industries and Water
Congratulations to the team at Rural Youth and the more than 400 exhibitors who staged an extraordinarily successful Agfest 2020.
This year Rural Youth showed its innovation in the face of coronavirus to stage Agfest in the Cloud and the Tasmanian Government was pleased to contribute a $65,000 grant to help make this happen.
Rural Youth has provided feedback that the web page received more than 1 million page visits over three weeks and patrons spent more than 3500 hours browsing the site.
It was fascinating that, apart from Australia, the website had visits from the US, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, India, Japan and the Philippines, and that Melbourne was the top city with 39.55 per cent of total visits.
Agfest is an iconic agricultural event and an important contributor to the State’s economy. It is a credit to the Rural Youth team that after they faced a potential wipe-out this year, they were able to regather and provide an online event to support their exhibitors.
The Tasmanian agricultural sector is renowned for its resilience and Rural Youth has certainly provided a great example of making the most of an opportunity and learning new skills at short notice.
Once again, well done Rural Youth on your innovation and we are all looking forward to a bigger and better Agfest in 2021.
