AEDE’s Professor David Kraybill, Project Manager of the Innovative Agricultural Research Initiative (iAGRI) – a USAID Feed the Future project in Tanzania, will participate in a Twitter chat hosted by USAID’s Agrilinks on February 14th from 12:00-1:00pm ET. The conversation will focus on agricultural higher education. You can join the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag #AskAg and following @Agrilinks. You can also follow the conversation on a livestream available on the Agrilinks website.
Investing in agriculture in higher education has the potential to be one of the most immediate and positive contributors to impacting and transforming food and agriculture systems in the near future. But a knowledgeable and committed cohort of farmers will require agriculture training and education in order to farm efficiently and effectively to produce the food that an exponentially increasing population will need to sustain itself.
The #AskAg Twitter chat organized by Agrilinks will bring together Kurt Richter (@KurtRichter2) of the Office of International Research, Education and Development at Virginia Tech and David Kraybill (@kraybillds) of The Ohio State University as they discuss the importance of tertiary agriculture education (TAE) in the developing world, traditional and novel ways TAE is executed around the globe, and how TAE can help us meet the challenges of 2050 by feeding the expected 9 billion people the planet will inhabit.
iAGRI, which is managed by Kraybill, is an ambitious five-year program to improve agricultural productivity and food security in Tanzania. The $24 million project will provide agricultural and nutrition training to 120 Tanzanian graduate students over the project lifespan. The project also facilitates and funds collaborative research on food security and nutrition between faculty from the project’s six American consortium universities (The Ohio State University, Michigan State University, Virginia Tech, Tuskegee University, University of Florida, and Iowa State University) and Tanzanian researchers who are part of iAGRI.
Agrilinks is part of the U.S. Government's Feed the Future initiative, which aims to address the root causes of hunger, poverty and undernutrition, and establish a lasting foundation for change. Feed the Future works to accomplish this by cultivating and supporting a global community of food security and agricultural development practitioners and building partnerships with public sector, private sector, and NGO partners. USAID's Bureau for Food Security leads the Feed the Future initiative and supports Agrilinks.
February 12, 2013