Event contact
Dr. LaKisha Odom
lodom@foundationfar.org
Across STEM (and beyond), organizations and institutions are grappling with the significant challenges taking place to recruit students and professionals to our collective workforce. This challenge is complicated by the changing landscape of technologies, demographics and economics. The challenges appear to be particularly acute within the agricultural and natural resources sciences arena.
A number of invested stakeholders have been asking the same question: How can individual professional societies and associations have an impact in this critical area?
To answer this question, the Tri-Societies* and FFAR are co-hosting a small stakeholder group meeting. The invitation-only event will focus on establishing an accurate landscape of the current agriculture/natural resources scientific workforce, discussing the barriers and challenges facing the next generation of scientists and identifying priorities for future workforce development efforts.
The objectives of this meeting are to:
- Obtain a shared understanding of the workforce needs in the agricultural and natural resource sciences pipeline,
- Identify structure, players and funding needed to address workforce research needs,
- Co-design an encompassing plan (a “moonshot”) to address current needs from academia, industry, federal and non-profit sectors, and
- Align efforts to provide a strategy to increase the recruitment and retention of a strong agricultural and natural resources scientific workforce
* American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, Soil Science Society of America