Caroline Welsh

Background

About Caroline Welsh

I have been a Director of GWMWater since 2015 and Deputy Chair for four years. I was a Director of the Birchip Cropping Group for 14 years and Chairman for seven. I worked for the Victorian state Department of Primary Industries for almost 20 years. For the first ten years, my key responsibilities varied as I moved from a Project Officer to a Project Coordinator and manager of staff. I initiated and managed projects to communicate and achieve practice change among horticultural producers. This included project application writing, budget management, employing project officers and evaluation. I directly managed and led the Horticulture Team, a team of young agricultural scientists for five years and initiated a broader, regional learning and communication process to enhance learnings across regional offices. I coordinated the response of state and local government and regional water authorities to large scale new irrigation developments enabling over ha of sustainable development. As Industry Development Coordinator I provided secretarial support to the regional grower association for five years and facilitated the development of a fresh stone fruit export group of 26 agribusinesses, and received a Churchill Fellowship in 1998 to assess markets and southern hemisphere competitor countries. I conducted lectures and practical demonstrations on soils and irrigation management for an Advanced Certificate in Farming TAFE course. For the last ten years of my time at DPI, I worked on projects trialling innovative methods to achieve on farm practice change at a regional scale, particularly related to changing environment. This work has mostly been done with a small project group of three to four. In another project I worked as part of a team with 30 key decision makers in Mildura to develop future scenarios for the region and identify key risks and opportunities associated with changing climate.