OAC Gets Students Ready for
Challenges of the New Millennium
By Owen Roberts

High school guidance counsellors were a little shocked.

Last fall, a group of them approached Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) Dean Rob McLaughlin for help introducing agri-food issues in early secondary school grades. The concept sounded good....but to McLaughlin, the catalyst wasn’t. Their goal was to accommodate farm kids leaving high school before graduating.

And he wanted no part of it.

“Dropping out of school will not give young farmers the skills and leadership tools they need to succeed in the highly competitive agri-food industry,” he told the teachers. “Some will inherently be able to cope, but without a post-secondary education these farmers won’t be in a position to compete and help maintain Canada’s global image and standing.”

And that’s the hard line. Welcome to Competitive U.

McLaughlin, who’s overseen a major make-over of agricultural programs during his eight-year tenure as dean, says agricultural education must raise its standards, not lower them. With the agri-food industry so much in the public eye nationally and internationally, producers need more education and training than ever before.

They need more breadth, too, which is why OAC developed ways for its 2,500 students to enter a diversity of academic streams. McLaughlin says OAC is still in the business of production agriculture...but entering the new millennium, that now that includes areas such as biotechnology, environmental protection, hazard analysis, international standards, world trade and precision farming, to name a few.

“The pressure to be exacting is everywhere,” he says. “And with commodity prices where they are, the drive is beyond maximum yield to maximum economic yield. The skill set needed to farm this way has gone up appreciably...this has become an extremely high-tech, knowledge-based, management-intensive industry.”

To that end, one of McLaughlin’s tenets is real-world learning for OAC students. Although that’s been a college cornerstone for the past 125 years, the need to clearly understand industry’s requirements has hastened as technology races ahead. To help students be ready for jobs – and give industry a chance to size-up potential employees – OAC developed new programs designed to give students more experience and exposure. It promoted team competitiveness and focussed on problem-solving techniques for students. And it offered new majors including plant biology, environmental biology and agricultural business.

That started attracting students who previously considered themselves too limited by an “agricultural” education...even though that’s exactly what they were getting, except 1990s style. And it gave the college the flexibility to be responsive to new trends.

For example, at the start of the decade, the environment was at the top of the agenda. Now, it’s food safety and health, preventative foods and lifestyle foods...like Mexican food, low in saturated fat and high in cancer-fighting compounds. In OAC, students take courses from professors at the frontline of advances such as the development of a white corn industry in Ontario, an Ontario Corn Producers’ Association-sponsored research initiative. OAC has taken a leadership position in partnering with industry, despite criticism from some sectors that the two may be too closely linked.

But it doesn’t seem to be bothering students. McLaughlin’s real-world style is paying off for them. In most programs, there are two- to three jobs for every graduate. In food science, the shortage is chronic – up to 300 positions in the food sector go unfilled every year with qualified graduates, at a time when the average undergraduate leaves university with a $20,000 - $25,000 debt. It’s clearly an area more students should know about, one that high school guidance counsellors would do well to steer undecided students towards.

The message seems to be getting through. Today, a typical “Aggie” (OAC student) is no longer from the farm – about two-thirds have either urban or rural non-farm backgrounds. When they graduate, they’ll typically be heading for jobs that support new-millennium style agriculture, rather than working on farms.

And McLaughlin wants them to tell the world about agriculture. That’s one reason he’s getting behind new communications initiatives at OAC, such as the development of an integrated agricultural communications program which recently received support from the Agricultural Adaptation Council.

“You don’t put a blip on anyone’s radar screen by not communicating,” he says. “We need our graduates to talk to the public. The public doesn’t understand how fragile the agri-food system is, with less than one-half of one per cent of the population feeding us. We don’t want to become dependent on other countries for our food...we’re an exporting nation and the future bodes well for us as long as we can keep producing high quality, safe food, and tell people about it.

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