No More Cows, Sows and Plows

Not far from the tomato field where one professor is testing his weed-killing robot, just across campus from the genetically altered mice that produce human-like milk, a bottle of raspberry-red liquid with bits of citrus pulp holds everyone’s attention.

There is something strange about the concoction.

The inventors, three UC Davis “ag” students, explain what it is: the rice-size globs from oranges and lemons are neither rising to the top nor sinking to the bottom of the tart and tasty beverage. They are floating, suspended thanks to the wonders of “fluid-gel technology.”

Farm schools, as colleges of agriculture are still sometimes called, simply aren’t what they used to be. Neither are the students who attend them.

Of the three “Aggies” proudly showing off their Raspberry Wisdom drink (“Wisdom” because the added gingko biloba extract is believed to increase blood flow to the brain), two are women, all three are minorities, and not a single one ever lived on a farm.

Once pushed to the brink of irrelevancy by the decline of the family farm and their own success at improving food production, colleges of agriculture nationwide have reinvented themselves, embracing technology and the environmental movement, and teaching students to market pre-washed, pre-tossed salad greens instead of simply growing lettuce. Historically more sloth-like than their parent universities, they have given themselves a modern make-over in little more than a decade.

And students, who upon hearing the word “agriculture” might once have sneered, “Oooh, digging in the dirt,” in the words of Davis Dean Barbara O. Schneeman, are enrolling in record numbers.

At the nation’s most prestigious agricultural schools, the land grant colleges established for each state by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, enrollment hit 98,000 students in 1977, then began to fall--and fast--until a decade later, when 64,000 students were enrolled.

Today, that figure for land grant colleges has climbed to an all-time high of nearly 118,000. Total enrollment at the nation’s 137 colleges of agriculture stands at more than 147,000.

Once the bastion of white farm boys, ag schools’ students are more than 50% urbanite today. Forty percent are women, compared to 30% a decade ago. And one in 10 is a minority, an increase of 300%, according to the Food and Agricultural Education Information System, a clearinghouse based at Texas A & M University.

“We woke up a few years ago and said, ‘Hey, no one’s walking in our door,’ ” said Joe Stasulat, a bear of a man who has been running the agriculture internship program at Davis since 1973. “We had to change.”

High-Tech Weeding

“That’s the nightshade, as in poisonous nightshade,” Davis professor David Slaughter says ominously, pointing to a tiny green plant just emerging from the rich soil. “That,” he says, pointing to a virtually identical sprout 18 inches down the row, “is a tomato plant.”

It is 9:30 a.m., which in this Sacramento Valley town means the heat is not yet withering, and Slaughter and graduate student Won Suk Lee are firing up the weed terminator. The gawky robot is a prime example of the high-tech research ubiquitous now at colleges that, just a few years ago, concentrated on “cows, sows and plows,” as Rick Parker, president of the National Assn. of Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture, put it.

The problem with this particular weed is that it is nearly identical to the tomato plants that cover thousands of acres surrounding Davis, one of the world’s premier agriculture schools and the jewel of California’s ag school system, the largest of any state’s.

And as the two laborers toiling in a nearby field can attest, as of now, the only way to remove the nightshade without removing the tomatoes is by hand or hoe.

The Information Age weed-whacker is currently towed behind a tractor but may one day be self-propelled and guided through the field by satellites. Equipped with surveillance cameras, it transmits images of the plants to a computer housed in a van parked at the edge of the field. Slaughter and Lee are slowly teaching the computer to tell the difference and make the call: friend or foe.

The tomatoes are spared, the weeds targeted with a finely focused stream of . . . well, blue-colored water for now. Eventually, though, they will be dispatched with tiny blasts of herbicide, or even concentrated fertilizer, which would then nourish the surrounding tomato plants.

“Pretty neat,” says Lee, who is dressed in pressed khakis and a polo shirt. The native of Seoul, like many agriculture students, says he was lured by the technology more than a desire to work the land.

As the “robotic weed control system”--to use the technical term--demonstrates, high-tech wonders have worked their way into the fields. (“You still need somebody who knows how to drive a tractor, but that tractor driver needs to know how to operate the computer on it,” said Joseph Jen, dean of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s College of Agriculture.) But much of the learning at agriculture colleges has moved indoors.

Lab coats have, to a great degree, replaced overalls. And rather than sporting “farmers’ tans” that stop at the biceps, many students and professors suffer the semi-translucent, melon-colored skin that comes from toiling under fluorescent lights.

Working out of an office littered with wine bottles--empty ones--from around the world, UC Davis professor of oenology and viticulture Carole Meredith spends her time performing DNA fingerprinting--of grapes.

Employing the same methods used in murder cases and paternity suits, she and graduate student John Bowers recently solved one of the wine world’s great mysteries, tracking down the mere and pere of the revered Cabernet Sauvignon grape.

Although their names may make their parentage seem obvious to the layperson, the union of the red Cabernet franc and white Sauvignon blanc actually came as a surprise to experts. But Meredith and Bowers found that it was 100 trillion times more likely that those two begat Cabernet Sauvignon than any two other random grape varieties--probably during a serendipitous meeting about 300 years ago in France.

Trivia? Academic esoterica of the kind Davis is sometimes criticized for promulgating? Hardly.

Grapes are California’s No. 2 commodity, after milk and cream, and worth $1.9 billion a year. The state’s thriving wine industry is worth $9 billion annually. With that kind of money on the line, grape growers, vintners, importers and exporters want to know precisely what it is they are buying and selling--and how to ensure its steady production.

“Agricultural education is now perceived as a more modern, forward-thinking enterprise,” said the silver-haired Meredith, tapping her Birkenstock sandals on the tile floor. “You can learn how to make wine, you can learn how to make beer, you can learn to ferment microorganisms.”

You can genetically alter mice so they will produce a human-like milk protein. But mice milk won’t go far as a breast-milk substitute for infants. Unfortunately, the darn cows have yet to cooperate in animal science professor Gary Anderson’s ongoing project.

You can also learn how to save the planet.

While quirky research and scintillating discoveries are often the stars of agriculture programs--and the sources of research and patent dollars--the decidedly less sexy field of environmental studies has played a monumental role in the metamorphosis of agricultural education. Dozens of institutions have added “environmental science,” or some equivalent, to their names to reflect the emphasis. Davis was at the fore of the pack, changing its name in 1969.

Never a focus of most ag programs--or the public, ag-types are quick to point out--humanity’s impact on the environment was largely ignored on campuses well into the 1970s. It was a time when farm chemical companies were pumping millions of dollars into campus research and the colleges were increasingly viewed as centers of agricultural capitalism run amok. Schools, critics alleged, were teaching a curriculum of higher yields at any cost.

By the mid-1980s, though, “Save the Planet” was becoming a pop culture cliche--and a market niche for foundering colleges.

“We recognized that there was a lot of interest in the environment among young people,” said Schneeman, Davis’ dean of the agricultural college since 1993, and the first woman to head such a program. “And if they perceived us as working against the environment, then we were not going to attract those kinds of students.”

Study of Natural Resources Grows

Two days before the Davis robot test and 450 miles to the south, the musky-ripe odors of livestock are riding the hot afternoon breeze across the campus at Cal Poly Pomona. Student Robert Gordon is sweeping his long arm before him and marveling over food of every shape and hue at the 16-acre Center for Regenerative Studies.

“Ninety-five percent of the landscaping is edible,” he says, “rosemary shrubs, lemon grass, sage, prickly pear--though I don’t like them much--almonds, apricots, peaches.”

It is the type of program that has captured the attention of a generation of students faced with the challenge of feeding--and clothing--a world whose population is growing at the rate of 90 million souls a year.

And it is the type of program that has helped colleges double the number of students enrolled in natural resource studies in the last decade to more than 25,000 nationwide. More undergraduates now study natural resources, a category that includes such specialties as urban forestry and range management as well as sustainable agriculture, than study animal science.

Twenty students live at the Center, although the site may one day support as many as 90. Their goal is not self-sufficiency; they simply work to get the most they can from the land without depleting or poisoning it.

The grapevines hanging from the nondescript brown dorms not only provide fruit but also help cool the structures--whose roofs are built to support canoe-size planters growing tomatoes, onions and squash, as well as catch rainwater.

Much of that rainwater eventually will become waste water, which is funneled into holding ponds. Algae eat the waste, tilapia fish eat the algae, the students eat the fish. And on, and on.

“This is the only way we’re going to survive,” said Gordon, 37, who grew up on a one-acre “mini-farm” in rural Colorado and returned to college after working in television production in Pasadena. “There’s no other solution.”

Emphasis on New Foods

Like the students at the Center, the colleges have sought to broaden their purview beyond simply teaching production.

After all, just 2% of agricultural jobs are in production today, compared to twice that a decade ago and about 40% three generations ago.

Instead of food, the schools emphasize food sciences. The “Raspberry Wisdom” drink, for example, was a runner-up at this year’s Institute of Food Technologists national student finals in June in Florida. (The winner: the University of Nebraska’s “Twist Steak,” pinwheels of beef and pork held together with a “natural meat binder.”)

The institutions have bolstered textile and manufacturing programs. At Pomona--where the agriculture dean is a former USC pharmacology professor--they are making the dress uniforms worn by pregnant U.S. Marines. The business arrangement with the Department of Defense is aimed at studying and teaching extremely low-volume manufacturing.

Students are studying the rice markets of Southeast Asia, the buying habits of harried urbanites, who will pay $2.99 for 25 cents’ worth of ready-to-eat greens, and defense satellites that can help farmers spread fertilizer in just the right place.

Ryan Tighe had a job using Global Positioning System satellite technology to help farmers fertilize corn and soybean fields before he even graduated from Iowa State University in Ames last month. “Grandpa was always telling us that we didn’t want to go into farming,” said the 22-year-old, who grew up on his family’s spread in nearby Jamaica, Iowa. “But he likes this [satellite] stuff a lot.”

Jen, the Cal Poly San Louis Obispo dean, said: “The No. 1 reason agriculture enrollments are turning around is that we probably have two or three jobs for every graduate.”

Changes in Ag Colleges

All the changes have certainly not come without a cost.

Nationally, the colleges are undergoing a process of consolidation, said Brian Chabot, associate dean of Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, which cut back its equine program in the early 1990s to increase support for its better-known dairy program. In response to its nearby competitor, Chabot said, New Jersey’s Rutgers kept the horses and put most of the cows out to pasture.

“We’re now getting down to a smaller number of what I’d call comprehensive agriculture schools,” Chabot said.

Like family farms, programs that have been unable to adapt have gone under, or been stripped down and assimilated into other majors. Over the last several years, Mississippi State has consolidated its animal and dairy science programs, the University of Arizona has phased out agronomy (the economics of agriculture), and Northwest Missouri State has shrunk agriculture from an entire college into a department.

Some contend that the growth in enrollment has come at the expense of research and argue that the broadened curriculum is going to produce students with no real agricultural expertise.

Other schools, such as Woodland Hills’ Pierce College, one of nearly 500 two-year ag schools nationwide, continue much as they have for decades, largely unchanged and barely hanging on.

Surrounded on all sides by the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley, the community college’s rolling 240-acre farm has avoided conversion into a golf course or office complex mostly because of vocal neighbors, who love the open space and the guttural calls of wintering Canada geese.

Enrollment in its agriculture program has slipped from a high of more than 2,000 in the 1970s to a few hundred each semester. The annual rodeo, a tradition, was canceled this year--the school’s 50th anniversary--for lack of money.

“The farm’s not going anywhere,” said Pierce President E. Bing Inocencio, a pragmatic newcomer under pressure to preserve the farming tradition and also bring troubled finances back into the black. But he also says that he will not support unpopular or inefficient programs.

Even Pomona, a beneficiary of cereal magnate W.K. Kellogg’s love of Arabian horses and the agrarian lifestyle, has yet to recover entirely from its enrollment dip of the 1980s.

“It’s not in the nature of universities to undertake rapid change in any circumstances--and that’s not all bad,” said Bill Allewelt, former chairman of the Commission on California Agriculture and Higher Education. But “many programs have not moved in concert with the rapid change in agriculture of the last quarter-century.”

‘Things Have Changed’

Back at Pomona, the day is nearing a close, but the temperature is still rising, the breeze picking up again, buffeting the “Susan Leahy for Associated Students President” placards staked around the campus.

The candidate, a 22-year-old ag-business major who has since won the election, looks anything but buffeted, however, her long blond hair well-coiffed and her black-and-tan power suit unwrinkled.

“I probably wouldn’t have gone to an ag school 20 years ago. I’m not into manual labor,” she says, chuckling. “But things have changed.”