Listowel District Secondary School hosted a special event on October 9 centred around careers in agriculture.
AgScape, a not-for-profit agricultural education organization, came to the school and set up an educational presentation where students rotated around the gym to six different stations to learn about careers in the agricultural space.
Madison Lammers, the program events coordinator with AgScape, says their goal is to bring food and agricultural education into the classroom.
"There's not a ton about it in the curriculum, so we just want to fill that need. We want to bring it directly into the classroom, free for teachers to use, very accessible, and just get hands-on experience, because that's really what students want and need right now, to learn about these important things in agriculture, as well as important careers," Lammers said.
Lammers says many people think agriculture just means farming, but the sector is so much more and many people are working in it.
"One in nine jobs right now are in agriculture and food, which is an insane number. But if you ask students originally before we run these events, almost none of them can see themselves working in this industry. But by the end of the event, they're like 'Oh wait, maybe that could be something for me.' So it's always nice to see that difference," Lammers shared proudly.
Within agriculture, there many other unique careers that span numerous different disciplines, and many people within those disciplines were on hand to teach the students at the LDSS event.
"Today we had everyone from a soil scientist to a food scientist to an egg farmer, even a bank lender, a welder. Every single trade is involved in agriculture and food pretty much that you can think of," Lammers pointed out. "It's just the system, if you think about it, from growing the food in the ground, everything that goes into that or our animals, all the way to how it gets to the grocery store. There's a million little steps in between and we need jobs everywhere across that whole system. So again, it's pretty much everything you can think of, there's a career there waiting for someone."
For more information on AgScape and their free educational programs, visit AgScape.ca.
