Florida grows next crop of leaders for agriculture
Maddie Dvorak wants a University of Florida agriculture degree and then a farm job — on K Street in Washington D.C. At 16, she sees her handshake and her message as the best tools she has to feed the world.
We need a lot more like her. The talent pipeline for agriculture isn’t flowing quickly enough to keep pace with the rising challenge to produce more food on less land. It’s estimated that there are only 35,000 qualified graduates to fill nearly 58,000 U.S. jobs in agriculture and natural resources annually.
That’s why it’s so important to expose Dvorak and her peers to what those jobs are, the educational opportunities to prepare for them, and the professional network to put them on a career path.
Dvorak just got back from what is perhaps the world’s leading gathering of professionals focused on agriculture as a way to lift billions of people out of poverty. World Food Prize events in Des Moines, Iowa, included the three-day Global Youth Institute for Dvorak, three other Florida high-school students, and peers from around the world.
Dvorak earned the trip to Iowa on the strength of her presentation at the Florida Youth Institute on the use of biotechnology as a tool to alleviate starvation in Tanzania. The subject matter prompted her to think globally, immerse herself in a complex topic, and to stand in front of an expert panel and defend her analysis.
UF’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences runs FYI to encourage high-school students to consider a career in feeding the world — and to consider CALS as a great place to prepare for that career.
CALS Dean Elaine Turner supports FYI to help the state’s most promising students see how they can shape the future of agriculture in Florida and around the world.
The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Sciences and CALS hosted Dvorak and 18 other students in Gainesville for a week this summer. Dvorak is active in Future Farmers of America, but she didn’t grow up on a farm. FYI gave Dvorak her first in-depth looks at an invasive plant center, a taste panel, a meat lab, and the springs in a state park.
She visited a UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences demonstration farm. She was given the chance to eat chipotle chocolate-covered crickets as part of a discussion on bugs as food.
She also met Florida Farm Bureau President John Hoblick and Farm Bureau general counsel Staci Sims, who are among the state’s most influential agricultural leaders.
The chance to learn from people who lead an organization that advocates for farmers reinforced Dvorak’s interest in a career as an agriculture lobbyist. It also strengthened her interest in majoring in agricultural education and communication if she’s admitted to CALS in 2019.
Our budding leaders benefit from seeing a broad scope of career opportunities in agriculture. For Dvorak, that meant deepening her understanding of how helping craft public policy is every bit the agriculture job that driving a tractor is.
Every industry needs a talent pipeline for its long-term success. Agriculture is different, though. Feeding the world is sometimes a matter of life and death. It’s a national-security issue because of correlations between food scarcity and civil unrest.
It’s going to take the best and brightest to keep America feeding a growing global population, even as so many American farms are turning into subdivisions. We need scientists whose discoveries improve farming and policymakers with ideas to overcome obstacles on the path from farm to fork.
There’s a compelling public interest for a public land-grant university to reach down into the high-school ranks to start developing talent. It supports the future of the state’s second-largest industry after tourism. Agriculture and natural resources keep more than 2 million Floridians employed.
I can’t say it better than Dvorak: “Their job is to produce food. My job is to protect their jobs.”