DOOKIE Agricultural College will have a two-day celebration of its 125th birthday next month, writes JOHN CONROY

Spread across 2500ha on the foothills of Mount Major and with a frontage to the Broken River, Dookie Agricultural College has been a fabled destination for aspiring farmers and agriculturalists for generations.

With rich and varied pre-Cambrian soils, the college farm boasts all manner of agricultural enterprise, from dryland and irrigated cropping to a Merino sheep farm, from dairying to orchards and vineyard.

"The facilities are fantastic and the neighbouring properties are quite diverse themselves, so you are exposed to quite a range of enterprises," present student Brendan Torpy, 21, of Ballarat, says.

The college opened in 1886, just south of the township of Dookie, and its graduates have provided much of the drive behind southeast Australia's farming production.

Next month the much-loved college, once run by the State Government and now a campus of the University of Melbourne, will mark its 125th birthday with past and present students and staff invited for a two-day celebration.

"The men and women who went to the place have become the backbone for farming production in Victoria and southeast Australia," University of Melbourne School of Land and Environment's Jeff Topp said.

The Dookie site was chosen in the 1870s by the Victorian Department of Agriculture, then the Council of Agricultural Education, which was searching northern Victoria for a place to build a new agriculture college with an experimental farm.

The idea had come from Britain and the US, which had both established similar colleges as they realised the need for a more scientific approach to farming in the wake of the industrial revolution.

With its variety of soil types, both hill and plain acreages and representative climate, Dookie was seen as the perfect spot and the college opened on October 4, 1886.

It was the first of its type in Victoria, pre-dating the Longerenong College by about five years.

"It offers a great variety of agriculture, typical of southeast Australia," Mr Topp says.

Twenty-three students turned up for day one and another 17 arrived in the days after.

They learned under the tutelage of founding farm manager John Low Thompson, a British agricultural college graduate and imposing Scotsman.

Thompson taught by "ocular demonstration" (i.e., by seeing) and students worked five days a week on the farm, getting their hands dirty at every chance, a tradition that survives today.

In 1911, the college introduced its three-year diploma of agriculture, the basis of the main course of the college until it was replaced by a three-year degree when Melbourne University took over in the 1990s.

By 1923 the minimum age of students was raised by a year to 15, and student numbers continued to rise steadily, by then up to about 25 graduates a year.

As the years passed, the blacksmith's workshop and the saddlery survived, but not in their original form, instead housing new mechanised and then electronic farming equipment, the Clydesdales in the stables eventually replaced by GPS-driven tractors.

"I love the history of the place; being up here you do get a real sense of just how old it is," present student Ariane Zihlmann, 21, of Melbourne, says. The college was quiet during World War II, then numbers boomed in the years after as servicemen returned.

Much of the campus was rebuilt in the heyday of 1960s and '70s and the era's simple, blocky architecture dominates the campus today.

The school population peaked in 1970, when there were about 300 students in residence and 70 graduates that year.

That year was also the peak of the college's sporting dominance in the region, with the Dookie College Football Club taking out the senior and reserve premierships in 1970 as well as a bag of individual awards.

The club declined in the ensuing years as more students were able to run a car, travelling home or elsewhere for their weekends, and eventually merged with the Dookie township's side to become Dookie United in 1977.

"There was a change in society that was reflected at the college, more students were able to run cars and they were also working part-time to support their studies," Mr Topp says.

"So they were preferring to go up in block period, study intensively for a week, and then get away and do whatever they liked with the rest of their lives."

The first female diploma boarder landed in 1973 - although they had been visiting the college as part of other courses for at least 30 years - and the number of girls on campus quickly reached parity with the boys.

In the 1980s, the college began to increase its relationships with other learning institutions, such as universities and TAFEs, and offer a broader range of courses as vocational learning increased.

In the 1990s, it became a campus of the University of Melbourne, which based its three-year bachelor of agriculture there.

But as the university implemented its "Melbourne Model" in 2008, sidelining its agricultural degree in the process, the number of students dwindled drastically, with its permanent student base, third-year bachelor of agriculture undergraduates, now numbering only 10.

"We're a tight-knit group but it's not quite the experience it once was," Mr Torpy admits.

However, under the now dual-management with Goulburn Ovens Institute of TAFE, up to 500 students from other courses visit for short stays, whether to complement bachelor degrees or vocational courses for TAFE.

And Mr Topp says the campus has a bright future.

"Dookie has much to celebrate with a glorious past and a bright future, with plans of being a world-class centre of excellence for research and development of systems and technologies towards efficient, climate-resilient farming."