"There's that immediate challenge and it's right across the country."
Federated Farmers Rotorua-Taupo president Alan Wills said the skills listed under farming were for jobs from the ground up. In Reporoa, where he farmed, farmers had hired people from India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines because they could not fill jobs with local workers.
He said one reason for the shortage was that people growing up in urban areas were not exposed to farming as a potential career.
"The dairy industry is crying out for people with skills," Mr Wills said.
"Some of our great success stories come from town. There's one who was an accountant and is doing very well but for a lot of people in the urban areas it's not even considered an option because they don't know anything about it."
Various attempts had been made to promote dairy farming but it was difficult to get young people started. One solution would be for farmers to have young, single workers living in their homes, as they did in the past.
Skilled overseas workers who came with a partner were often easier to employ, he said.
Lakes District Health Board chief executive Ron Dunham said they tried to look within New Zealand as a first option for all staff recruiting but also looked overseas for senior roles.
"It is always our desire to appoint New Zealand-trained doctors to these roles, however at the end of the day we appoint the most suitably qualified and experienced doctor for the role," he said.
Over the past one to five years, they had more and more domestically trained doctors complete specialist training and move to the Lakes area to work as senior medical officers.
Mr Dunham said the proposed immigration changes would help attract people, but were "probably not essential" for the positions they needed to fill.
He said the health board participated in programmes to help secondary-school students into the health workforce, including the Gateway Programme in which students could shadow clinicians, and the Kia Ora Hauora Programme, designed to assist Maori secondary-school students into a health profession.