All segments of society are dealing with the demographic reality of the baby boomers; Agriculture is no different. Now that the leading edge of the boomers are retiring, and the 18-year-old segment of society is getting smaller, my guest today says agriculture related industries are going to run out of knowledgeable, motivated recruits. Dr. Michael Trevan,Dean of the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences at the University of Manitoba, says this is not due to a lack of great opportunities but because of a perception problem with our agriculture and food related industries.
Kevin: With all the turmoil in the markets in general, and wild swings in the commodity markets specifically, the reality is there is a great deal of bullishness in agriculture and it's related industries. The opportunities abound in the biological sciences, bio fuels, agricultural research related to health care, environment, automotive even home construction. It's unprecedented and it's exciting…at least to those in the sector…but maybe not for young people looking for a career. Dr. Michael Trevan is Dean of the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences at the University of Manitoba . He says with all these career possibilities, the agricultural sciences are not even on students radar.
Dr. Trevan, can you describe the concern that you have for students not entering the agricultural sciences?
Dr. Trevan: Well I think my concern is that they're missing a great opportunity. I'll just give you one statistic which came from last year because we got the complete year's stats on that. And that is, as a faculty we graduate at something in the region of 80 students. During the course of that year, industry sent us advertisment sent us for about 1,000 opportunities. Some of them were summer jobs, a lot of them however were permenant jobs. And we had a number of students who actually before they graduated last year, were sitting there wondering which of these three job offers they really ought to take. So those are the opportunities I think people are missing on that sort of scale.
Kevin: And of those thousand or so, I mean, describe for me a little bit of some of the kinds of opportunities. I mean I think part of the issue is here when kids think about jobs or agriculture related industries, maybe the first thing that comes to mind is primary agriculture, so I'm going to be working..sweeping in a dairy barn. Tell me a little bit of some of the opportunities you're getting.
Dr. Trevan: Well I mean, that's right and out of the jobs that surround this entire industry, only about 10% of them are actually anywhere near the farm or on the farm. The other 90% are in opportunities that occur in things like seed companies, fertilizer companies, equipment manufacturing companies, either as engineers or sales people or working generally within those companies. Or after the farm gate or sort of transport food processing, food production, working for the government for say in food safety, or in the retail end of the sector. And it doesn't just stop with just food because it now incorporates all those bioresources that we have.. things like bio-fuels, fibres, the ideas of using natural fibres to build large parts of an automobile or even using hay or straw bails to build an entire building. These are sort of the more recent advances in agriculture. And what I think what we've found is that when a prospective student thinks about agriculture, they think 'well I'm not going to be a farmer, so therefore it won't be for me'. We're still, actually we have the evidence that the number of people who come from rural areas, their parents are saying to them 'Farming's been so difficult over the past 15 years. I really wouldn't go near it as a career if I were you'. So the students who've normally tended to come to us, who'd been the rural students are being put off by their parents and their friends, from actually coming into a very vibrant industry at the moment. I'm honest, it's not going to go away because the one thing that everybody has to do is eat!
Kevin: Exactly right. And you know interesting I was going through an agcareer's website just recently, and I was starting to read down...you know careers that have never occurred to me as technology development assistant, quality assurance supervisor, development biologist. These are all agriculture related careers. There's an awareness problem here isn't there?
Dr. Trevan: I think that really is the point, I mean, we get a lot of students who eventually find us. Very often because they know somebody whose a student in the faculty. And they say 'I want to do molecular biology' so I went into science faculty. Well hang on a minute, you know, we do a huge amount of molecular biology, mostly with plants, not just with the production of genetically modified crops but the understanding in which the plant works and what makes for example a plant more drought resistance. This has been a major research project at the University over the past few years. So the huge number of jobs actually just in the basic sciences alone, and then there's the entire area of industry. We've had students who come up to us from agribusiness and agrieconomics courses saying 'thank heavens I found this, because particulary in a place like the prairies, so much of the business activity is related to agriculture, to the food supply chain, and to those extra sort of bio-resource instusters that we now have. So someone with the interest and knowledge of agriculture.. you may find yourself working for an oil company.
Kevin: Wow. So you started off suggesting at your faculty about the numbers...Is this a wide-spread, Canada-wide phenomenon?
Dr. Trevan: It is, and it started around the mid 1990's, and the pattern is being repeated across most of the agriculture faculty in Canada , which there are eight. Um that the student numbers really hit a high in about 1995, and they were declining for the next decade. For about the past four years, we've been making some more determined efforts to recruit students and our numbers have actually gradually creeping up against the trend in the universities as a whole which is a downward trend, and that's a demographic trend as much as anything else. But it's actually gotten to a point where a number of the agriculture faculties have either considered or have taken the word 'agriculture' out of their faculty title, because they found it was producing the wrong message. An exception to that and somebody who really has in fact managed to reverse the trend even better then we have is the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon and there the college, what is now the College of Agriculture and Bioresources has had a very active program for the past couple of years supported by industry to interact more with high schools, not just with the students in the schools but with the teachers, helping them to provide intrest and materials to use in class which is agriculturly related. And this seems to have paid off in a big way. So I think you're absolutely right, it's a perception problem. It's a problem that isn't difficult necessarily to overcome but it's a problem that takes certainly an amount of effort and money.
Kevin: So from your perspective, where does the solution begin? It's one thing for you, and I'll ask you in a moment about some of the strategies that you're putting in place to bolster your numbers there in the college. But where does the process begin, because I guess I'm assuming because a lot of parents are no longer from farms, they're not talking about persuing a farm career as a kid...you know, where does it begin? Public school maybe?
Dr. Trevan: Well I think it begins across the system. I mean for example, in Manitoba , there are relatively few teachers working in the public school system in any level, who have any background degree or education in anything to do with agriculture. That's a structural problem within the Manitoba school system. But it means within those schools, you've got teachers who are enthusiastic to incorporate this stuff into their curriculum but need help in doing so very often and there are programs that actually do that. But I think the biggest place that we need to address in actufact is in those rural communities, and in those farm communities so the young people growing up there, and that's still 50% of our students, they understand what the full equantity of the opportunities are in the industry. And... they see too much as it were the difficulties, and they don't see the other advantages and benefits and possibilites I think. So it really actually begins if you like, with the farm families and the rural cmmunities to make sure that their young people actually make a... have the ability to make a proper choice by understand what the agri-food industry is all about.
Kevin: Now, so what do we do about this? I mean, you're the Dean, and your role I guess there, is to keep undergraduate enrollment numbers up so how have you approached this?
Dr. Trevan: Well, we're doing a number of things. The monies we are very much looking at the demographic trend across the whole of Canada and in particular rural Canada , where the number of 18-year olds each year is declining. So one of the things we are doing is that we are trying to increase the activity we have in recruiting students from outside of Canada. We also want to do this for a good educational reason...and that is it can actually help internationalize our programs anyway. But the other thing we're doing is we train some of our senior students and we send them out to the high schools, so they actually talk to the students there about careers in agriculture. We attend all the sort of educational agricultural fairs that we can, so we can put the message across. And we just in actualfact recruited an additional person into the faculty, whose job will be to work very closely with the high schools in order to actually mimic these success of the University of Saskatchewan . I'm a great one for pinching good ideas from other people if they seem to be working.
(laughter)
Kevin: And you mentioned also, an interpertive centre. What is that?
Dr. Trevan: Ah, well this is something.. and this is a longer term strategy..I mean I came from Europe about four and a half years ago, and there in Europe we've already seen a long period of time where the general population, particulary the urban population become disconnected from their food supply, and although it's a bit simplistic to say it, it was the thought there that milk came from the supermarket rather than from a cow. The same thing is actually happening in Canada , and it's happening because we are losing those generations of people who had part of their family who had worked on a farm. And that's partly simply because of inwood migration from other countries. So we're building an Interpretive Centre down at our Glennedy farm which is about 10 minutes south of the city on route to the U.S. And that's going to be, by the time we finish, probably going to be a four to five million dollar project to tell the story of what it takes to produce food going all the way from soil to the supper plate. And telling it in a way which is balanced so it explains what the plus sides are and what the minus sides are and the minus sides are in the way we presently do it. In an attempt to get the visitor the ability to have the information so they can make a choice so they can say 'well I like the way this is done' or 'I don't like the way it's done, I'd rather it was done this way' But I now understand both what it takes in effort but also in science and technology to get the food onto my plate, in a way that is going to be the least possible damage to the environment and provide me with a healthiest possible diet but also helps maintain the industry because if the industry isn't healthy then so then nobody gets to eat.
Kevin: Well it's a facinating subject and no doubt farmers and agricultural industries across the country are all quite interested because human resources are definitely becoming an issue in terms of finding qualified help moving forward.
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