Best Ag Education for a Future Producer

Published on Mon, 02/08/2010 - 4:51pm

Ariel Waldeck is a strong advocate of a college education. The University of Kentucky student is majoring in both Agricultural Communications and Integrated Strategic Communications; she’s also active with collegiate FFA.

She says, “The way that the University of Kentucky and FFA are headed right now, I think they’re on a great path… they have the best intentions and the best basis that any organization or college has over the U.S. and around the world. I just think they need to continue what they’re doing, and then just keep refining all of the contests and all the curriculum.” Without those two institutions, she says, “I wouldn’t be where I am.”

And where she is…is in business. The native of Upton, Ky. started showing

Brown Swiss dairy cattle in the fifth grade, taking the lead from the herd operated by her late grandfather. “A couple of years after I started showing, we just had grade cattle,” she says. “I was like, ‘I’m not really getting many places in the show ring or showing the animals, just because the genetics aren’t there’.” They switched to artificial insemination, which Waldeck says got them halfway there; then, they moved to embryo transfer, and that was where she got the idea for her business, All American Genetics. “We flush cows for other people,” says Waldeck. “We put in embryos for other people; we put in our own embryos and then sell calves on the show market. So, it’s a very broad business.”

 

Broad enough that she entered the state FFA Ag Entrepreneurship competition, won her chapter and region, finished second in Kentucky and went on to be a national finalist. Waldeck never dreamed she’d get that far; her reasons for entering were pragmatic—“My advisor in high school told me, ‘Just do it; you get money for just applying for it’.” Waldeck acknowledges she couldn’t make a career of her business, describing it as “a very in-depth hobby.” She hopes to go into public relations or communications for an agribusiness. This is where she says she’s benefited both from FFA and UK. “I had learned a lot as being an entrepreneur,” she says, “but the school helps to polish off what I’ve already come in with. FFA drastically improved my ability to speak and my ability to communicate with people; I’ve always liked to talk, but school has been able to show me more ‘behind the scenes’ types of things that you don’t typically see when you look at a company.”

 

She describes Upton as “just a small town USA,” and says there were both farm and town kids in her FFA chapter. “Most of the people that I know personally through FFA are going to school,” she says, “just because if something breaks up on the farm, they have something to fall back on. A lot of people realize that farming is hard to make a living so they are going to be going into the workforce, but they’re kind of like me—they want to come back to the farm and have that as a hobby, as a way of release after being at a ‘job’ all day, I guess,” she laughs.

 

For those who plan to make dairying a profession, there are regions of the country where family-sized dairy farms predominate and the universities offer coursework in dairy science. But that hasn’t been where the growth has been in US dairy production. The southwestern states are among the biggest dairy producers, but the output comes from large, commercial farms rather than smaller, family-sized operations. As a result, the dairy science departments at area land grant schools have diminished.

 

“The number of dairy science students that we have entering our program has decreased significantly over a number of years,” says Mike Tomaszewski, Texas A & N professor and Extension dairy specialist. One reason—A & M doesn’t maintain its own herd.   “In fact,” says Tomaszewski, “very few universities [in the Southern Plains] have any dairy herds left. The only one that has one is Tarleton in Stephenville, Texas; they’ve got a small one, although they are building a new dairy.”

 

As is the case with other schools in the region, Tomaszewski is also the only member of the dairy management faculty at A & M—in a state with 400,000 milking cows and 20 million lbs of annual production, and a growing industry. With little opportunity to give their students hands-on dairy management training, Tomaszewski got together in 2008 with instructors at seven other southwestern state universities, and the result was the Southern Great Plains Dairy Consortium.

 

The consortium might be described as a crash course in practical dairy management. From mid-May through the end of June, students gather from all over the western U.S. to a single location—Clovis, New Mexico, where there is a substantial concentration of dairy cows in large herds with modern facilities.   A dozen faculty members from schools across the region, plus specialists from the private sector, provide six weeks of instruction in such subjects as nutrition, breeding, facility design, herd health and dairy economics. In between field trips to participating farms, students are taught in classrooms offered by a local community college.

 

After they came up with the concept, Tomaszewski and his colleagues had to figure out how to pay for it. “In our tight economic times, no university wanted to redirect funds to this effort,” he says. “So, we basically contacted agribusiness, and agribusiness was willing to step up because they’re in need of trained professionals to enter the field, whether it be in production, consulting, reproduction or nutrition, whatever the area.” The first class of 18 students in 2008 received scholarships through the support of agribusiness; last year’s class had 22. A couple of them were from outside of consortium member-schools, whose number has grown to eleven—including their first member, the University of Florida, from east of the Mississippi.

 

Support from agribusiness has been “hampered somewhat,” Tomaszewski acknowledges, by the dairy economic crisis of the past two years. Fortunately, they were able to procure a USDA Challenge Grant in the area of regional education, which will provide funding support for the next three years. He says, “Hopefully, as the economy becomes more robust, we’ll still be able to maintain our sponsorships. What we’re trying to do is create a program such that it will be able to continue on into the future.”

 

Tomaszewski says the program has been well received by industry and the universities. “We’re seeing students that historically would not have looked at a dairy science option now seeing that it’s an opportunity for them,” he says. “There are employment positions that are available in the dairy sector because of the growth of our industry, especially on the High Plains of Texas and New Mexico.”

 

Tomaszewski says in many cases, the students he sees who plan to enter the industry aren’t majoring in dairy management; instead, they study business and economics, and that’s related to the increase in the size of operations. “We’re at 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 cow production units,” he says, “and so some of the skill sets that they’re needing are more business related.” The consortium gives these students an opportunity to still have a major in business, but obtain some practical theory courses in advanced management.”

 

In addition, for those students whose schools still offer dairy science majors, in most cases the credits they acquire in Clovis transfer back to their home universities. “What this has allowed some universities to do,” says Tomaszewski, “is recreate minors or certificates in dairy management, where in the past they’ve not been able to offer those particular courses to their students. It fills a niche that’s happened in our particular industry, by providing the dairy-type management to individuals interested in that particular program.”

 

For information on this year’s offerings, go to the consortium’s web site, sgpdct.tamu.edu. Tomaszewski expects enrollment to be up again in 2010, and notes the student does not need to attend a consortium member school; he says, “It’s really open to virtually anyone who’s interested in upper level dairy management.”

 

Tags: