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This story on agricultural journalism is a guest post by Caroline Stocks. Be sure to visit her bio by clicking above on the author link for more information. Thanks, Caroline!

Whenever I tell people I’m an agricultural journalist, I always brace myself for the barrage of questions that invariably follow.

“Do you just write about cows all day?” is a common place to start, usually followed by: “Are there enough farmers in the U.K. that they need their own newspaper?”

If the person I’m speaking to is a bit rude (which, sadly, happens quite often), they’ll even ask: “You write about farming? Didn’t you want to be a proper journalist?”

For the majority of people who live and work in a city, agriculture is a little-known industry. As long as the shelves are stocked when they nip to Sainsbury’s after work, few people think about where their food comes from, let alone how it’s produced.

From urban life to an unexpected career in agricultural journalism

It’s an issue I can speak on from experience. I grew up in a city, studied journalism at university and ended up writing about farming purely by accident.

Before I became a farming journalist, the closest I’d come to agriculture was once buying eggs from a farm shop and hearing The Wurzels on the radio.

But once I got into the industry, I was fascinated by all the stories there were to tell, and I became determined that I was going to share them with as many people as possible.

From covering government policies, environmental issues, and business and economics to livestock production and crop science, I love the breadth of what I get to write about.

I also love the chance I have to tell people about the work and passion that goes into producing the food we eat.

For too long, the focus has been on getting our food to be as cheap as possible without really thinking about the consequences, not just to farmers’ businesses, but also to the environment and the public’s health.

I see my job as being not only to inform farmers about the developments in their industry to help them drive more efficient, profitable businesses, but also to help build that lost connection between farmers and their customers.

Critical questions represent an opportunity to “agvocate”

It’s a belief that I know many agricultural journalists around the world share.

Over the past decade, my job has taken me across Europe and further afield to countries including India, Australia, Canada, Tanzania and the United States to report on farming issues and meet other agri-journalists.

Without fail, I’m always struck by the fact that not only does every country’s farming industry have similar concerns and issues, but every single producer and agri-journalist shares the same passion for what they do.

So, yes, it may not seem like a quirky job to an outsider, but I see every one of the daft questions they ask as an opportunity to tell them about how great the industry is.

And if I can say I spent this past summer travelling through Germany, Italy and France meeting some fascinating people and learning about some incredible businesses, then I’m happy I decided against being a “proper journalist.”

An interview with Dr. Karl Dawson

The following is an edited transcript of our interview with Dr. Karl Dawson, vice president and chief scientific officer at Alltech. For Karl’s full bio, click here.

Before you joined Alltech, you were head of the University of Kentucky (UK) animal science department for 20 years, and you still serve as an adjunct professor with UK. You have a unique insight from being in the private sector business as well as academia. How do we interest the next generation in ag science?

That’s a real interesting question because there’s been a gap develop between what we call agriculture, particularly animal science, and the technologies that are being developed today. As a scientist, I think the technologies are really exciting, but sometimes it’s kind of hard to get the next generation, particularly the people from rural America and agriculture, to get excited about the same things. We have a lot of unique technologies. We talk about molecular biology and the things we can see with molecular biology; most farmers I talk to, most siblings from farmer’s kids that are coming off the farm, do not have a good understanding of what those things are, so we have this gap that we need to fill.

What we’re finding is that often times just the university education is not enough to give them confidence and the ability to lead in agriculture through using these technologies. One of the things we are doing right now is looking at a lot of outside programs that go beyond their degree and beyond academic training to see how we can interest students in doing those things. It starts at a very young level. We have programs that are set up at the elementary school. On our staff in research, we have two liaisons that do nothing but interact with college, high school and elementary students to get them interested in what we’re doing in terms of science and how that can be incorporated into farm life.

Other programs that are very interesting are those that are competitive. We have an innovation program, where we have students build projects that will become a business plan themselves, taking technology and applying it to specific problems. It’s an outside-of-the-classroom activity that gets students excited. There is nothing like seeing them light up when they win an award for a project.

We have, at a higher level up, a career program. This is built around the idea that students who come out of college need that little extra boost and piece of information. We actually take students and embed them into the business situation and, in some cases, right on the farm so they get to know the animals and what the farm business really looks like. This is before they go out and try to set up their own business or work within a commercial business.

The take-home message is that we really need to give experience, hands-on experience outside of the classroom. That’s really becoming almost a requirement for our people as they move into our business.

That certainly makes sense. As a professor, and on the Alltech side as the head of our research program, are the up-and-comers that you’re seeing from an agriculture background, or do they come into agriculture by chance because of other things they are interested in?

You run into both kinds. I came up through the agricultural school system, so I’m used to land-grant universities and the kids that came from the farm. But I actually looked at the list of students that were competing in our Young Scientist awards, and I asked them: How many of you are from an agriculture background? Of the 15 sitting in the room, only two raised their hands. You know, the kids are gravitating to agriculture because they see some of the applications that can take place.

It’s almost reverse of what we think. We think about children leaving the farm and never coming back. These are students coming in from urban environments, from science environments, and wanting to understand what’s going on on the farm.

That’s encouraging and fascinating.

It really is. You think about that and it really reflects the excitement of agriculture research and application technology. I kind of coined a term I’m going to use in my presentation here talking about the “farmer technologist”; that is the kind of people who will probably be our leaders in the future.

Dr. Karl Dawson spoke at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference. Audio recordings of most talks, including Karl's, are now available on the Alltech Idea Lab. For access, click on the button below.

Agronomist Dalynn Ramsay describes some of the recent remarkable results seen in crops treated with Alltech Crop Science.