August 6, 2018 – Within the last five years, according to the AgCareers.com Enrollment and Employment Outlook Survey, less than 1% of college students were in an agricultural major, even fewer were from ethnic minority populations. As such, college graduates enrolled in Ag career majors are more in demand than ever. The agriculture, nutrition and human ecology programs in the College of Agriculture and Human Sciences (CAHS) at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) stand ready to meet the basic needs of prospective students. First, no cost residential programs in the summer are available to prepare them. Secondly, CAHS scholarships are also available to support them financially once they enter into their college experience.
The Jr. Youth Leadership Lab, one of several youth summer camp programs held on the campus and hosted by the CAHS’ Cooperative Extension Program (CEP), introduces middle school students to the abundance of opportunities in agriculture careers. This event is the precursor to the annual 4-H Career Awareness Leadership Lab. It is exclusively for students in 6th-8th grade and allows participants to get exposure to leadership skills. While attending the camp, young people learn the importance of teamwork. They experience the excitement of school-related subjects like Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). They even discover what it means to live a healthy lifestyle through better nutrition changing the way they think about food from the farm to the table.
At camp this year, youth met celebrity reality TV star, Dr. Diara Blue, co-owner of Cy-Fair Animal Hospital from episodes of Vet Life on the Animal Planet network. Dr. Blue told the middle schoolers, “Setting goals and investing in yourself is the most important thing you can do.” With that motivation, they set out to plan, develop, and design a marketing strategy for the products they created from the many lessons learned during the week. The training included measuring the sweetness of watermelon varieties, extracting DNA from strawberries, and creating a dish to present the nutritional value to an audience of their peers.
Attendee Jordan Haynes said, “My grandmother has lots of gardens…I never knew that was really called agriculture.” She further declared, of all the robotics workshops, critical thinking activities, and teambuilding exercises, “Of course, my favorite was the cooking challenge.”
Reports from the University of Missouri-Columbia shared startling statistics showing African-Americans nationwide are just over 1% of all farmers in the United States and only .5% own agriculture land. The CEP expects results that increase knowledge among youth about how ubiquitous agriculture is in daily life. They seek to change the behavior of youth so the next time they complete a college application, agricultural professions will be a realistic option for their career success making a difference in future generations of minority farmers, ranchers, and agriculturalists.
This work was supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture 1890 Extension Formula Program project under Section 1444.
Cynthia Pierfax
4-H and Youth Development Program Specialist
cmpierfax@pvamu.edu
(936) 261-5028