America's Farmers Mobile Experience
America’s Farmers Mobile Experience. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.
There is a secret to getting peoples attention and it is not standing still but getting in front of them. Waving your banner right in their face and that is what a new project is doing. Feeding a growing world population is a challenge being addressed on many fronts - from seed companies to farmers, to processors and everyone in between. To help consumers and farmers alike understand the process of increasing our food supply - the America’s Farmers Mobile Experience has been launched. The mobile experience is a 53-foot trailer that opens into a three room - one thousand square foot display. Tom Hoogheem describes it as three acts..
HOOGHEEM: Number one is it focuses more on how fast the population in the world is increasing and we like to say that in the next 40 years we’re going to have another 2-billion in addition to the 7-billion people that we have already. And then in act two we show what I think is a beautiful video about a farm family in northern Missouri and they talk about what it’s like to be a farm family today and how they’re going to try to grow more food to meet the demand and then we get to act three and we talk more about the technology that the farmer is asking us to develop so that they have the opportunity to grow basically more food on the same amount of land with less input.
Hoogheem is an ag educator. During a recent stop in Keokuk, Iowa - Hoogheem led several groups of students through the mobile experience. He says the tour holds young people's attention
HOOGHEEM: Almost all of them seem to be listening and they do ask a few questions. We’ve had biology classes today, we’ve had an anatomy class -which was kind of different and an awful lot of FFA kids. So FFA, they are very interested because they see their folks using this kind of technology and the new science every day.
Hoogheem stresses science education and careers in agriculture to the students.
HOOGHEEM: It’s just phenomenal the opportunities that exist in agriculture and it’s just not farming. A lot of this technology we’re using biologists, we’re using microbiologists, we’re using engineers in addition to the classic ag which would be more like agronomy and farm management.
The America's Farmers Mobile Experience was introduced at the 2011 Commodity Classic and has only made a few stops so far. Tours are free and open to anyone - so look for it to stop at a community near you.
That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
