By: Kofi Agyei, Armaan Sachdev, Adina Shrestha, and Ashleigh Mock

What do you want to be when you grow up? It is a commonly asked question for our age group. But does anyone actually have an answer? During our discussion of careers today, lead by the on-site director, Jeremy Elliott-Engel, we discovered what it meant to have a career. Jeremy told us that the definition of a career is a series of jobs which will change over time. He also emphasized that our career should not be about the title or the salary but about the experience and skills gained and our contribution to society.

With choosing a job in our culture today, there are a number to choose from. There is a National Career Clusters list which categorizes every type of job under one of these 16 career clusters. The shocking part about this for the majority of us was that agriculture is a part of every single one. Jeremy challenged us to find a single career cluster that would not fit into agriculture. Though many tried to find a fault with his bold statement, Jeremy was able to connect every single job back to agriculture.

Here is the official list of career clusters: https://careertech.org/career-clusters

Jeremy also taught us the importance of networking. Networking means to interact with others. It means to actually look up from your phone and have a real conversation with another human being. Scary, right? He taught us this through a fun, interactive activity, “Who Wants the Same Career?” He also gave us some guidelines for how to network properly. For example, do not be aggressive, do not be creepy, and present yourself as authentic.

Every wonder what to believe as you scroll through social media? What about that catchy fact the infomercial just spouted out? Or that uncle who claims he knows everything because one time he took a chemistry course… but does he really??

Well the Governor’s School for Agriculture probably can’t assist you with that meddling uncle, but we are here to promote educational science outlets. Today’s highlight: Don’t Eat the Pseudoscience!

This Facebook phenomenon began as a joint effort to promote safe, factual information about food related topics – ranging from GMOs and organic foods to that trendy unicorn frappuccino from Starbucks (hint: it wasn’t even the most sugary thing on their menu). Don’t Eat the Pseudoscience strives to make food easier to understand for everybody in a fun, personable, and relatable manner.

Don’t Eat the Pseudoscience isn’t just about catchy phrases and cool videos (though I promise there’s no shortage of either), as stated on their Facebook page, they value:

• Ensuring a safe, wholesome and stable food supply through science, and technology.
• Acknowledging that food additives are not scary chemicals, but tools with helpful purposes, preservation, added nutrition, or enhanced functionality. 
• Thinking critically about what we read on social media about the food industry. 
• Involving our viewers, inviting them to share their thoughts and perceptions.
• Nourishing our bodies with a variety of foods in moderation, recognizing that foods high in calories and low in nutritional content should play a small role in one’s diet.
• Getting information from science, specifically peer-reviewed journals, and other reputable studies.

These scientists strive to make food, science, and technology fun again! And hopefully a little more accurate and informative than your uncle’s thoughts on coconut oil…

So go check them out!

GSA Staff

P.S.: Special thanks to the GSA panel on Food Safety and Agriculture Applications featuring Brandon Herndon, Casey Phillips, Dr. Suzy Hammons, and Dr. Tatiana Lorca. The students could have asked questions for another two hours regarding dairy, meat, and other agricultural products had we let them!

(This is just some of the students rushing the stage after we officially ended. Makes my little science loving heart sing!)

By: Sam Park, Huy Huynh, Grant Martin, and Cory Scott

Invisible, but Real: The Cost of our Decisions

Led by esteemed professor Michael Ellerbrock, PhD, students this week were given an introduction to the field of agricultural economics. Dr. Ellerbrock emphasized that every choice we make, whether it be deciding how many hours to sleep or what classes to take, is dictated by an economic reality. From an agricultural perspective, farmers must apply economic theories to determine what crops to harvest with their limited resources. There are many variables to consider when making these decisions, including soil quality, profitability, and total yield. Through the Production Possibilities Curve (PPC), a graphical representation of the maximum output possibilities for two goods, students learned how to deal with scarce resources by comparing their opportunity costs. When farmers decide to reserve land for corn production, the opportunity cost they incur is the forgone benefit of producing an equivalent amount of another crop. It is important to be aware of all associated costs before pursuing any one course of action. The concave shape of the PPC graph reflects how opportunity cost increases as production expands. Comparing the cases of a polluted and clean environment, Dr. Ellerbrock further demonstrated how any change in the inputs or the state of the economy can alter the shape of the curve.

Is Water More Valuable than Diamonds?

Proposed by 18th century philosopher Adam Smith, the Diamond-Water Paradox investigates the apparent contradiction in pricing between diamonds and water. The principle of diminishing marginal utility supplies an answer to the paradox, stating that the perceived value of, or satisfaction gained from, a particular good declines with each additional increment consumed. Rather than valuing a good for its total benefit, this principle suggests that true value instead lies in each successive unit of a product. This concept explains why people put very little value on their next glass of water, despite water being a necessary factor of survival, while putting very high value on their first or second diamonds, which are unessential to human life.

Citations:

The first image was taken by a group member

Second image: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwinxZraxvPUAhULOD4KHaq1AmkQjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DqG4RkKJ34zg&psig=AFQjCNHByUDbMFvPqetEQ6BfZXhNoFNH8g&ust=1499392560771972

By: Meghan Hancock, Abigail Holden, Uday Sidhu, and Abraham Han

The field trip to Kentland Farm demonstrated several key ideas enforced in the “Milk 101” lectures. With great management of natural resources, the farm helped us realize the efforts needed to get a carton of milk on the table. We first visited the calves, at the Calf Center. This is where the calves are kept. They first are placed in individual pens called hutches. Eventually they are placed with other calves and are fed by an automatic system that scans the tags on their ears. The scan tells the machines how much to feed the calves. When the calves are old enough, they are weaned off of the colostrum (a special milk that the mothers produce) and placed in another area in the calf center to begin eating a special mix of corn, hay, soybean meal, and minerals. Once they are old enough, they head to the milking parlor. Kentland Farms operates a parallel milking parlor. In this parlor, the cows are lined up in two rows with their rears facing each other. The space between the two rows is where the dairy farmers set up the claws to obtain the milk from the cows. The manure pit was an essential part of the farm, as it provided the proper plumbing and sanitation for the cows. The cows can excrete whenever and wherever they please, and every hour or so there is a stream of water that flushes out all of the manure. From here, all of the waste gets flushed out to the two circular places toward the backend of the farm, where a motor constantly mixes the manure. After the sand and dirt is separated, a truck collects the manure and uses it as a natural fertilizer, creating an efficient system. Some of us had the privilege of witnessing a live birth in the special needs barn. Originally, the dairy farmers were concerned that it would be a difficult birth, but fortunately both the mother and calf were fine. Mr. Dave Winston, the leader of our group at the dairy farm, commented on how we “lucked out” with the incredible timing of our tour.