Tell Your College Kids: These 4 Ag Fields Have Great Job Opportunities
Agriculture is more than just farming. Here are four agricultural fields with great job prospects that don’t involve plowing.
Earlier this year, a study led by Purdue University determined that in the next five years there will be close to 60,000 job openings annually in fields related to agriculture, food, the environment, and renewable natural resources. We spoke to three professors at Purdue – a major research university located in West Lafayette, Indiana, which is consistently ranked as having one of the top agricultural sciences programs in the country (and world for that matter) – on which professions are emerging in this field.
Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Agricultural engineers can focus on machine design, design, and processes of getting food produced at the farm to your plate, or environmental challenges working with soil, water, and air, says Bernard Engel, head of Purdue’s Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering. Careers include working for equipment manufactures in the agricultural, forestry, construction, and military industries. On the environmental and natural resources end, there are jobs with various government agencies or consulting firms.
Engel says the all of the programs in his department are in high demand right now. “Many of the advances in agriculture right now are coming in this area. The future looks bright as well, given expectations of even more technology being used in agriculture in the future,” he says in an email.
Biological engineers deal with issues that include food processes, things like making food taste better or making it last longer; and cellular and biomolecular engineering, which concerns “finding better ways to get value from by-products or getting energy from biological materials.” The food industry is a major employer. Engel says there is also a demand in research and development for these graduates, not only in the food and pharmaceutical industries, but also in genetic engineering in plants.
Agricultural Systems Management graduates help make agricultural technology easier to understand and use, says Engel, and students in this area are “highly sought after in careers with machinery, grain handling, and precision technology.”
Soil Science
Students can focus on soil ecology, chemistry, physics, conservation, and soil landscapes – mapping the soil attributes of a certain area – among other fields of study. John Graveel, an agronomy professor and director of the Natural Resources and Environmental Science program at Purdue, says job prospects for soil scientists right now are very strong. Job opportunities include working for state and federal agencies, environmental consulting firms, and other groups, like the Nature Conservancy.
… because we’re entering an era of data-driven decision making, “the students who can position themselves to be strong from an analytical and problem-solving perspective are going to have an edge in the market.”
“Soil science students are getting some training in geographical information systems [GIS],” Graveel tells Modern Farmer in a phone interview. (GIS is a computer system that is used for collecting and displaying data as it relates to geographic points on the Earth’s surface.) “It’s hugely in demand right now by consulting firms to have people on staff who know how to do GIS.”
Agricultural Economics
Agricultural economics is the practice of applying economic principles to public and private decisions made in the agricultural sector, explains Kenneth Foster, head of Purdue’s Agricultural Economics Department. The field includes sales and marketing, agribusiness, farm management, policy making, and natural resource and energy economics.
Job prospects are “pretty strong” for graduates in this “heavily data and metric driven” field, Foster says. “We placed 98 percent of our graduates last May by the end of the summer. Well over 100 students got jobs.”
Pro tip: Foster says because we’re entering an era of data-driven decision making, “the students who can position themselves to be strong from an analytical and problem-solving perspective are going to have an edge in the market.”
All three professors agree on what students interested in these fields should be focusing on: math and science. You get a bonus for taking part in extracurricular activities that help build leadership, communication, and organizational skills.
Startups
Finally, let’s not forget the entrepreneurs out there who are tech savvy and like to go it alone. Agricultural technology startups are blooming right now. Last year the industry grew by 170 percent and had more than $2.36 billion in investment, according to the website TechCrunch.
“I think the agricultural tech industry is doing well because it’s been overlooked for awhile. I think that’s really going to change and it’s going to continue to grow,” says Jason Aramburu, founder and CEO of Edyn, a startup that makes a smart watering sensor for crops.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].Tell Your College Kids: These 4 Ag Fields Have Great Job Opportunities
by Andrew Amelinckx, Modern Farmer
September 9, 2015
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
It is very useful n I want to learn to do modern farming