Purdue Ag Week is taking place this week and is celebrating 10 years. Bennett Walther is a Purdue senior studying ag econ with minors in animal science and farm management and the president of the Purdue Ag Week task force this year. He explains the goal of Purdue Ag Week.
“For those of you that have been to Purdue, you know we kind of have two separate areas of campus. We have the ag side, and we have the other side. The goal of Purdue Ag Week was to bring agriculture to the other side of campus to those individuals in the engineering school, the sciences school, to kind of not only educate them on agriculture, but kind of celebrate agriculture as a community and as an entire campus.”
The Purdue Dairy Club had a cow out on Memorial Mall on Milk Monday and the task force is collecting canned foods all week to help “Hammer Down Hunger”. For the rest of the week, Walther says, “We will be doing some sponsorship stuff, working with some of the major, large companies in agriculture. So, your John Deere’s, Bane Welker’s, Case, stuff like and kind of highlight them.
“Thursday, we focus on meat production. We call it ‘Burger Bash’, so we talk about the meat production, the livestock side of things, and then we actually hand out about 1,000 free hamburgers to students on campus. Friday, we have it’s affectionately called Fry-day where we typically pass out fries, but this year with COVID safety we are actually passing out bags of prepackaged chips.
Walther, who grew up on a livestock farm, says Thursday’s Burger Bash is his favorite day of Ag Week.
You can learn more about Purdue Ag Week here.