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It wasn’t a great night for the Purdue football team Friday, falling to Wisconsin 38-17, but there were still some things to celebrate at Ross-Ade.
Purdue Ag Week isn’t until the spring, but Purdue Ag Day was celebrated before and during the Friday night football matchup between the Boilers and the Badgers. Student members of the Purdue Ag Week Task Force were on hand though for Ag Day with a scaled down version of their annual service project.
“If you’re not familiar, during Ag Week, we do an event called Hammer Down Hunger where we packed over 60,000 meals in the spring,” says Kayla Grennes, president of the 2024 Purdue Ag Week Task Force. “And it’s all getting shipped internationally or staying locally within the Indiana area.”
Grennes is a Michigan native and is pursuing her undergrad degree in Plant Genetics, Breeding, and Biotechnology. She says the Hammer Down Hunger event is very near and dear to her heart.
“We decided for Ag Day that we wanted to have a mini–Hammer Down Hunger here to just bring back some service aspects of the day and also just get out there with Ag Week early. We want to keep spreading the message of what Ag Week does and just get involved with our Purdue community because it’s something that all of us in the task force love to be able to do.”
Grennes says they packed just over 6,000 meals on Friday.
Ag Week will take place April 1-5 on Purdue’s Memorial Mall. They aim to educate campus about the various facets of local, national, and international agriculture.
“There are so many people that are in this industry, and it affects so many. It affects everybody. Everybody needs to eat. So, we’re really trying to figure out what are ways that we can make Ag Week bigger and better than every year that’s come before it. That’s something that all of us really strive to do because we want to affect as many people as possible because if anybody can walk away with a little bit more knowledge about where their food comes from, or their fuel or clothes, or just how they are a part of the ag industry as a whole, that’s what we want to do.”
The Purdue Ag Week Task Force also has a podcast available to help spread information about agriculture. It’s called the Farming the Future Podcast and is available on Apple, Spotify, and other podcast platforms.