By Stephanie Schupska
University of
Georgia

Brutus stood patiently as yet another student pulled on a glove
up to her shoulder. The steer has gotten used to people
sticking their hands through the fistula, or tube, in his side,
reaching into his stomach and squeezing a handful of his
lunch.

The steer is doing his part to help attract students into
animal and dairy sciences at the University of Georgia.

Recently, 54 high school students gloved up and reached through
Brutus’ side as a part of the two-day Animal Science in Action
program designed to spark students’ interests in agriculture.

“The best way to get kids is to recruit early,” said Steve
Nickerson, ADS department head in the UGA College of
Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

ADS is already one of the UGA college’s largest departments,
with 165 undergraduates on the CAES Athens and Tifton campuses.
Nickerson said their short-term goal is to enroll 200
students.

“One percent of the whole U.S. population feeds the rest of the
country,” Nickerson said. “What’s going to happen in 10 to 20
years? We’ve got to recruit more kids into production
agriculture in order to feed the growing population in the
future.”

The job demand is high for animal and dairy science students
who don’t become veterinarians. Four to five jobs are waiting
for each of them at graduation, Nickerson said.

Nickerson estimates that 20 percent of the Animal Science in
Action students eventually enroll at UGA under his department.
Another 20 percent ends up elsewhere in the CAES.

The program is open to high school rising juniors and seniors
and mostly draws students from Georgia. This year, however, one
girl flew from New York, and another drove up from Florida to
attend.

With more jobs than applicants, the outlook is good for
students with ADS degrees. “There is a need now in the animal
and dairy industry for all the graduates they can get,” said
ADS professor William Graves.

But what really attracts students to the increasingly popular
recruiting program is its hands-on approach, Graves said. And
vaccinating a piglet and sticking an arm into a fistulated cow
is about as hands-on as it gets.

Good news for the industry and the department is that
enrollment in the two-day Animal Science in Action camp was up
in 2006. In fact, for the first time ever, Graves had to
coordinate two buses full of students.

Even better is that the department “has been advising a lot of
freshmen this summer,” Graves said. “We’re very excited about
that.

“The hands-on part of the department helps attract students to
our programs,” he said. So does the veterinary college, which
pulls many of its students from the CAES animal and dairy
science program.

“We seem to place our kids very well within the industry,”
Graves said. “A lot of them end up in the vet school or in
graduate school.”

The department is also dealing with the fact that “so many
people nowadays don’t know where milk comes from,” Nickerson
said. From tours for the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program high
school applicants to Animal Science in Action, the department
is educating people on knowledge that was commonplace 100 years
ago.

Recently, ADS had a Beef 101 class for 26 chefs and others who
work in the restaurant industry to educate them on where the
beef they serve comes from.

“Many of them had never touched a cow,” Nickerson said. “It
gave them an appreciation of where a cut comes from.”

(Stephanie Schupska is a news editor with the University of
Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)