Saskatchewan is ramping up efforts to attract young people to the field of agriculture.
The province is expanding and en-hancing its popular Think Ag recruitment program.
The initial project was a 15-page catalogue featuring young people working in various agricultural jobs throughout the province. It was distributed to school guidance councillors in the spring.
“It went so well, we got such great feedback, that we’ve now decided to launch Think Ag in a bigger way,” said Alanna Koch, Saskatchewan’s deputy minister of agriculture.
Read Also
Feds promise urgency to address canola tariffs
With Canadian canola growers under new price pressure, federal and Saskatchewan government and industry officials have met to discuss next steps in dealing with China’s canola trade barriers.
The province will be unveiling its expanded Think Ag program during “Agriculture Month” in Saskatchewan in October.
Details still have to be hashed out, but the program will include additional publications for schools and career fairs, enhanced website offerings, a mention of the program in other Saskatchewan Agriculture publications and participation by groups like the Saskatchewan Institute of Agrologists, regional specialists and employers.
Koch said the goal is to get kids excited about a career in agriculture and teach them that it’s not just about farming and ranching. There are jobs in plant breeding, mechanics, marketing, business and science.
“There’s so much diversity, so many dynamic opportunities. We’re the cool place to be,” she said during an interview at the Ag-West Bio annual meeting.
Koch said the province’s chronic labour shortage is a drag on the agricultural economy.
“As we see all these exciting times ahead, we believe one of our greatest barriers to success is going to be the lack of people,” she said.
It is a particularly vexing problem for agriculture, which faces stiff competition from the mining and oil industries.
“The reality is some of our starting out careers can’t compete with some of those starting out wages of people who frankly, in some cases, don’t even have post-secondary education and go straight into the oil sector.”
Curtis Pozniak, a wheat breeder with the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre, has had some success recruiting university students into the field of plant breeding.
“One of the things I try to do is get them young,” he said during a panel discussion at Ag-West’s meeting.
Pozniak likes to show first year students some of the projects breeders are working on.
“It’s exciting stuff that we’re doing. Once students see and appreciate that they don’t just think about it in terms of farming. They see it as real science,” he said.
“Since we’ve done that there has been an explosion of students that are interested in plant breeding and bio-informatics and genomics.”
Pozniak is amazed by this year’s crop of grad students working in the field of plant breeding.
“They really get that it’s not just about generating knowledge, it’s about translating that knowledge into production,” he said.
