In February DairySA invited young applicants between the ages of 18 – 35 to apply for an Australian Dairy Conference scholarship, with the selected recipients receiving a complimentary full conference and event ticket.

Chelsea Donhardt and Nathan Hicks were the lucky recipients in 2025. Read all about Chelsea’s experience below:

It had been many years since I last attended the Australian Dairy Conference, my previous one being in Geelong in 2014, so I was incredibly grateful to DairySA for the opportunity to attend this year’s ADC on the Gold Coast. I truly enjoyed every moment of it.

From reconnecting with familiar faces to meeting and networking with many new ones, I returned home with a list of innovative products and services from the trade displays that I’m excited to explore and potentially implement on my own farm.

The entertainment for the gala dinner was none other than John Schumann, the Australian songwriter who told us the detailed story behind his world-renowned song “I was only 18”. His story was so captivating that you could have heard a pin drop in the audience, he spoke with such genuine passion and honesty which ended with many of us in tears and a standing ovation after his performance.

This year’s ADC theme was “opportunity in milk” and there were many great keynote speakers to outline what this meant. The take home message that I got from it was that agriculture in general is tough, especially in today’s world, we are constantly dealing with large variety challenges and with new ones constantly being added to the list it is easy to feel like we are under attack and feeling like we have to defend our farming methods. However we heard from speakers such as Josie Angus from Signature Beef, Nico Lyons Head of Science DairyNZ and Henriette Guldager from ALRA that encouraged us to open our minds and embrace change as an opportunity to innovate and evolve our businesses and industry into something better. A few examples of this include:

• Hayden Lawrance, a New Zealand farmer who adopted liquid nitrogen and more targeted fertiliser strategies to maintain pasture growth following NZ’s nitrogen limit regulations introduced in 2021.
• Josie Angus and her family undertaking the bold challenge of building their own paddock to plate supply chain after being at the mercy of unstable beef prices and lack of meat processors in Queensland.
• ARLA, the world’s fifth-largest dairy company, which has introduced a program to assess environmental sustainability on farms and financially reward those that meet key targets.

Succession was another topic that a few speakers talked about, I personally have heard quite a lot about this topic over the past few years, but I particularly loved Claire Booth. She is a lawyer and farmer who spoke about succession from a different angle with regards to the messy and expensive legal battle poorly managed succession can have on a business and the devastation it can cause within a family. Along with listing some important things that must be included when trying to create a succession plan such as the tax implications.

In summary I really enjoyed my experience at the ADC and I will definitely try to attend the next one. Thankyou again DairySA for providing me with this opportunity.