Yahoo Education posted an article earlier this year listing the top 10 most useless college majors. Number one was agriculture.
The article claimed that because farms are getting bigger, more efficient, and scarcer all the time there will be fewer farm management jobs available. Therefore the whole degree is pretty much worthless.
You might be interested to know that the agriculture community responded with such force that an article posted on Yahoo Finance a few months later listing the top 10 worst college majors didn’t place ag anywhere on the list at all. Turns out there was a lot more to agriculture education than Yahoo knew.
Sunday night at our Missouri Farm Bureau annual meeting high school and college students (many majoring in agriculture fields) competed for a scholarship with speeches explaining to all why ag education is not only viable, it is growing!
True, there are fewer farms now than there have ever been. But there is a lot more to ag than planting seeds and milking cows! Someone sells fertilizer to farmers. Someone develops the formula to create the very best fertilizer. Someone ships the fertilizer, packages it, advertises it, etc. And these fields are growing!
The world’s population is expected to double by 2050. That means we’ll need to double the amount of food we grow. With fewer farmers. And less land. So we’ll need scientists to help figure out how to do it, or we’ll all be hungry. We’ll need people to do all kinds of problem-solving to feed the world. And maybe we won’t need lots of people to actually grow the food, but the ones who do will need to be highly educated.
At least, we’ll need all this if you plan to keep eating 🙂
Daddy's Tractor 