RE: My Experience At California's Soil Born Farms - A Peak Into An Organic Urban Farm
This is a great post. I live in a rural part of San Diego with lots of farms and horses. Our main high school has an emphasis on agriculture. Exactly what you said, "Who is going to grow our food in the future". Previously I ran a STEM program and taught kids how to build robots and program arduino. I had a really smart guy that worked for me part time that had degree in Aerospace engineering. He couldn't find a full time job anywhere else. I was realizing that there maybe too many engineers, computer programmers, etc... graduating and not enough workers willing to figure out how to keep this world sustainable. I also visited Nebraska this summer. I learned from my in laws that the family farms are becoming extinct. All these farming towns use to be flourishing and now they are turning into ghost towns. All the kids after graduation wanna leave and move to the city.
That's awesome that the high school focuses on agriculture! It's so rare to find youth education in agriculture these days.
That's really interesting about the STEM program. I think there will be a huge intersection between technology and agriculture in the coming years and a lot of tech/agro jobs. I also think there has been a false binary between farm technology and sustainable agriculture and that there is a huge potential for technology to foster sustainable agriculture.
I think you got something there. I just hope those graduating in those fields use their talents for as you describe vs. going after the big bucks and working at Monsanto. Although, I worked in the lab and there was never real big bucks as a scientist, you did it for the love of science. A common joke in the lab we had was that a PhD is just a "poor house doctor". Have a nice weekend!