09/06/07 Learning About Ag

Learning About Ag. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. College students can't always take advantage of study abroad opportunities for a number of reasons, time and money being two of the biggest. But the University of Idaho has developed a way for agriculture students to visit other countries without pulling the students from class or taking a deep cut from their pocket. John Foltz is the Associate Dean and Director of Academic Programs for the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. FOLTZ: A lot of universities are trying to find some of these shorter term opportunities where they can go, maybe not get the full immersion experience like they would for 6 months or a year but at least be exposed to it. Our college, the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences has made a commitment to try and increase that. Foltz says a couple of years ago a commission wanted to see one and a half to two million students studying abroad within the next 5 years and of course that is a difficult number to reach due to the time and cost factors but he says even though the college offers the longer term courses, they are reaching more students with the shorter term programs. FOLTZ: One of my goals, and I'm not sure I'm going to reach it, but I'd like for us to approach 6  8  10% of our students have some sort of study abroad experience. So you are talking 100-110 students. That's a lot of students. This past year we went from that 4 or 5 up to; we had 9 students go to Mexico over spring break last spring, we had 7 students go with us to Taiwan. And the reason we got more taking advantage of this is it just fits their busy lifestyle better. Students had the opportunity to see the agriculture is handled from the fields to the various processing plants. Even the types of products that are available was an eye opener. FOLTZ: A number of the students commented that when they'd go into the stores they would see a much broader variety of flavored milk products than we get over here. They had almond milk and they had orange milk and they had coconut flavored milk. So some of them tried that and they said, wow, we should have something like this in the U.S. You could see the gears turning and their minds going  this is interesting and the array of foods is different and some might work in the United States and some might not. Even though some of the students had been out of the U.S. the experience taught them about diversity. FOLTZ: And that's part of what we want them to get out of it that in some respects things are very, very different but in other respects people are similar worldwide. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.