A student led committee has come up with a College of Agriculture multi-club effort to create Purdue Ag Week on the West Lafayette campus this week. Joe Harmeyer is a senior who chairs the committee.
“This is the first and it’s been definitely a humbling experience to see all the College of Ag clubs and all the students coming together. My team, the steering committee has come together as a team and learned leadership and learned how effective and talented people can accomplish things and get it done.”
About a year ago ten students got together to plan a way to engage college of ag and club students, those Harmeyer calls the future stakeholders of the industry. They also wanted to promote agriculture on campus to non-ag students and faculty.
This week they are accomplishing their goals. The family of ag students has been brought closer together, and Harmeyer says the dairy club’s milk Monday is one example.
“They had over 950 students that they impacted, that they handed out a free grilled cheese sandwich to and spread the good dairy word.”
Monsanto is on the Purdue campus Wednesday.
“The agronomy club is hosting the Monsanto trailer, their Farmers Feeding the World exhibit. That will be pretty neat to allow non-ag students to walk through the trailer. Also the food science club is holding a food science symposium about food and going back to the basics, so that will be interesting to have more of an academic approach.”
This first year was a year to get clubs involved in the week, and Harmeyer is confident they have laid a good foundation for ag week to happen again next year.
“Hopefully they increase the quality of their events and increase the quality of visitor interaction. It’s definitely a foundation to build from and we’ve laid a pretty good framework to do that.”
The animal agribusiness major from Franklin County says those interested can follow Purdue Ag Week on Twitter. He also thanks the Indiana Soybean Alliance and Indiana Corn Marketing Council for support of their campus promotion initiatives.[audio:https://www.hoosieragtoday.com//wp-content/uploads//2012/04/2012-Purdue-Ag-Week.mp3|titles=2012 Purdue Ag Week]
The full HAT interview with Harmeyer:[audio:https://www.hoosieragtoday.com//wp-content/uploads//2012/04/Joe-Harmeyer-on-Purdue-Ag-Week.mp3|titles=Joe Harmeyer on Purdue Ag Week]
(Harmeyer photo credit, Purdue Agricultural Communication’s Tom Campbell. Milk Monday photos courtesy of Shelby Britton, Publicity Chair for Purdue Dairy Club)