Students from the University of North Georgia are spending the week in Iowa through an agricultural exchange program with Ellsworth Community College, learning firsthand about Midwest farming and grain production.
The group stopped Thursday at the Landus Cooperative location in Bradford, where students toured the facility and learned about grain handling, storage and the role cooperatives play in Iowa agriculture.
North Georgia Associate Professor Linda Purvis says the program helps students better understand how Iowa’s large-scale corn and soybean production connects to agriculture in Georgia, where poultry, cotton, peanuts and produce are more common.
“We just talked and over the years developed this program where we study American Midwest agriculture and learn where all of our commodity crops come from,” Purvis says. “And so we bring students out for a week and we tell them all about Iowa agriculture. We learn about corn and soybeans and swine and turkeys because those are commodities that we don’t grow a lot of in Georgia. And then we connect it back to what we do have a lot of. So connecting it back to what we do, but also showing them how it’s also different and how it’s connected because we have to get a lot of corn for our animal feed and we have to ship you guys poultry because you guys have swine, we have poultry. So just trying to show them and kind of broaden their horizons on agriculture outside of our state.”
Purvis says many students are surprised by both the flat terrain and the massive scale of Iowa farming operations compared to North Georgia.
Ellsworth Community College Professor of Agriculture Kevin Butt says his students will make a return trip to Georgia in January, where they’ll study poultry production, specialty crops and other aspects of Southern agriculture.
“We also combine that with down there there’s a big expo for livestock producers and the processing side of things,” Butt says. “So we kind of combine that in as well. But yeah, we took a group of students down last year. We’re looking at going again this upcoming January. Probably the biggest difference was the topography of me down there. We’re up under the hills. We’re in the, you know, the mountains up north, you know, and just the diversity that we saw. I mean, we saw everything from a mushroom farm to orchards, big orchards, vineyards, just the diversity that we saw.”
The exchange program also highlights career opportunities across the agriculture industry. The Georgia students arrived in Iowa on Monday and will remain in the state through Sunday.
Pictured are students and staff from North Georgia who made several stops this week learning about grain production in Iowa and how agriculture differs from Georgia.
More comments from North Georgia Associate Professor Linda Purvis below
More comments from Ellsworth Community College Professor of Agriculture Kevin Butt below
