Last fall, Tarleton State University began offering a Bachelors of Science and Agricultural Communications as an official major. From 2020 to 2021 there has been about a 75% increase in students majoring in Ag Comm. 

“Agricultural Communications is important because as people get further and further away from the farm, they lose awareness of how this all works and why we are such a vital industry. . . Where Ag Communicators of Tomorrow [ACT] comes into it is part of a national organization that is really about advocacy, short-story telling, promotion/marketing for our industry,” Assistant professor in Agricultural Communications, Dr. Chandra Andrew said. 

Dr. Andrew started at Tarleton 15 years ago in the marketing department, and began teaching five years ago. Andrew supervises the Ag Comm based student organization. Andrew shares that the goal of the club is to shed light towards how Ag Comm students can utilize their degree by incorporating fun and business into this organization.

“My goal is to connect them to each other [ACT students,]” Dr. Andrew shared, “when you get involved in ACT there’s additional opportunities that I can expose you to that you may not get in the classroom, but like anything you get out of it exactly what you put into it.”

According to The Washington Post, seven percent of American adults believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. That’s roughly 17 million Americans that are misinformed about agriculture, which is where agricultural communications comes into play. 

“More than 98% of our population has no understanding of agriculture in general,” Dr. Andrew said. “We have people who believe that corn doesn’t really grow on a cob and that meat just comes from the back of a grocery store.”

The first ACT took place September 8th at Heritage park and was an informational meeting. ACT plans to meet twice every month; one meeting will be business oriented and the second will be based around building relationships with other ag majors in ACT. 

To learn more about why communicating agriculture is important and to get involved, visit https://nactnow.org/.  For more information regarding the Tarleton Agricultural Communicators of Tomorrow club as well as meeting times, visit Tarleton Agricultural Communicators of Tomorrow on Facebook.