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Andy Murdoch

Andy Murdoch

0:02 I’m Andy Murdoch and I’m the senior lecturer in horticulture at the College of Agriculture and Food and Rural Enterprise.

00:09 The main basis of, of it is training people in horticulture and training them and educating them, skills etc. As well as that it’s like dealing with people on a daily basis, trying to take them from one place and skilling them up to get a job. We’re working with sixteen, seventeen year olds where they’re actually developing and starting a career.

00:27 I’d loved sort of working on the garden at home and I just took it from there. I didn’t really realise that I was going to have a career in horticulture at that stage, it was just an interest and then I thought, well I’m going to leave school, what am I going to do and I went to college and I actually came to this college and did a one year programme here and that was the start of it.

00:48 My dad had a dairy farm and so it was logical that I would be a dairy farmer and I knew that’s one thing I didn’t want to do cos I’d tried that out. But I always was in the garden, outdoors, doing that type of thing and I was the only son so he had and it was a, a hand-down family farm and it was his father’s and his father’s before that so there was a long tradition of dairy farmers there and it was expected. Everybody in the family would expect that I would then be the dairy farmer. It’s very difficult to change the flow, the expectation, ever since you’ve been born that you’re going to be the farmer, the person who’s going to take on, expand, you know, do, buy some more land, expand it, move on ahead up. There’s always that expectation and then to suddenly say, well no, I don’t want to do that, I think that was quite difficult, I think that, during that summer time, in June and July, August was, was quite a difficult time.

01:45 As a dairy farmer you’re very isolated. You’re working very much on your own, whereas my job here, I’m working very much as a, as a big team.

01:53 Well he’s a retired dairy farmer and I’m working here happily, so (LAUGHS) well he’s, he’s sold most of his cows now so and everything’s worked out OK.

02:04 At school I, I did GCSEs, I didn’t really have much interest, I wasn’t really applying myself very well and I wasn’t really focussed, I suppose, at that stage and somehow then I just seemed to fall into what do I want to do and I thought yeah, horticulture definitely.

02:21 After I left college I went over to Scotland and I, I completed more qualifications and then I came back to Northern Ireland and I got a job in a garden centre and I managed the garden centre, to begin with and that was for about three years and after that I moved into parks management and I was into parks management for about seven years and had a great time in that. Managing local authorities’ sports facilities, burials and graveyards and also making sure that the parks were looking good.

02:54 It was really built up with the experience and qualifications. The job spec for this, this job was really experience and qualifications and coming back into it and then when I got back into this job I needed to get more qualifications, specialised qualifications, on-job training as such. So I went back to university and did a post-grad in education and then I went back and did a masters in horticulture.

03:19 I think there’s been a lot, I think choosing and making that decision to come and study horticulture that wasn’t a family tradition, was a turning point and another turning point I think was to decide to come into teaching because I was in a very good job in the, in the parks department and deciding to move from that and do a teaching job was I think, a difficult, a difficult job.