Swanson Russell

Last month, Yahoo! posted an article titled, “College Majors That Are Useless.” The number one most useless degree listed was agriculture with agriculturally-related degrees animal science and horticulture coming in fourth and fifth, respectively. My experience in agriculture began the day I was born teaching me values that rarely still exist outside of the agriculture industry including work ethic, resourcefulness and time management. My choice to pursue a degree in agriculture was one of the best life decisions I have made as it provided an education I use on a daily basis and an abundance of extracurricular activities including networking, event planning, marketing and much more. Needless to say, I strongly disagree with this article.

I graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in animal science and found myself employed a month before graduation, and I had choices to pick from. I was not alone in the college of agriculture with career options upon graduation; the majority of my friends had secured employment as well, unless they were planning on attending graduate school.

As with many times in the agriculture industry, the author failed to do proper research, using only one source for his writing and not gathering all sides of the story. Additionally, the author took the numbers he gathered in far too narrow of a focus - agriculture degrees in relationship to working on a farm or ranch. In reality, people with agriculture degrees work in many capacities from agri-marketing, like me, to sales, finance, education and engineering, to name just a few. In fact, the agriculture industry is the nation’s largest employer with more than 21 million Americans working in some area of the industry (according to Future Farmers of America’s (FFA) website. Agcareers.com , a website solely dedicated to those looking for a career in agriculture, experienced a significant increase in jobs posted on the site in 2011 although U.S. unemployment rates remained high. No other industry can feed or clothe the world's population that is growing at a rate where we cannot produce enough food for the number of people, which means jobs with security despite what happens on Wall Street.

I’m not alone in my rebuttal of this article. Within hours of the article being posted, a Facebook group called, “I Studied Agriculture &I Have a Job” surfaced. It didn’t take long for agvocates to make sure their voice was heard. Others have taken to the Internet to state their successful claims backed by their education in agriculture. Such posts come from Farm Progress and the National FFA Organization blog. Even my alma mater had a response

In the end, agriculture is more than “getting up with the sun and working till it sets,” as the author of the article writes. It is a way of life. My education has allowed me to work in an industry that I’m passionate about, travel around the nation and meet with others who share the same passion. What has your agriculture degree done for you lately?