The Natural Resources Conservation Service is looking for a few good men and women. But NRCS chief Terry Cosby told reporters they’re having a hard time finding the right people because of a lack of soil training.
“It seems to me that anyone that’s in agriculture, a foundational course would be soil. You have to understand that because that is the backbone of farming and what we do. And so we’re having a challenge right now on college campuses finding students that could come work for us.”
Cosby says NRCS also has a big need for range managers. But again, those who are trained are hard to find and harder to hire.
“There were only 400 students graduated from college last year with a range management degree. I needed all 400 of them. I didn’t get very many of them because there are just so many opportunities right now, you know. Used to be coming out of college, we got what we wanted. But right now there are just too many opportunities. And so we have to be very competitive to get these folks.”
In order to boost the NRCS branding and visibility, Cosby has instituted an ambassador’s program.
“We’re on all these college campuses, we’re asking a couple of students to be ambassadors for NRCS. And we’ll supply them with a little swag. They wear that for us, they recruit for us. They’re there 365 days of the year talking about NRCS. And we’re seeing some results there. We started with a few colleges last year. We hope we can have this on every college campus across the country where we have these ambassadors for USDA, especially NRCS. But we’re trying to be more competitive with the public sector. And we were going to continue to do this.”