Perth campus will introduce business agriculture diploma in 2019
Staff Writer
Farms.com
Algonquin College’s Perth campus will offer a two-year diploma in ag business starting in Sept. 2019.
The program will combine agricultural knowledge and skills with business training to prepare students to manage a farm or work in the ag industry. The diploma program will also teach students about livestock and crop management, the purchasing of equipment and government regulations.
Alumni from the now-defunct Kemptville College, a campus of the University of Guelph’s Ontario Agricultural College, are helping to design the program.
The program is intended for people already involved in farming, as well as individuals involved with insurance, ag service businesses, and banks that deal with farmer loans, Chris Hahn, dean of the Perth campus said in an Algonquin Times
article on Monday.
“People who graduate from this program can either go and work directly in the farming business or they can work in all the other businesses that are ancillary to them,” said Hahn to the Algonquin Times.
The program will also assist with succession planning.
“You’ve got a lot of farmers who will want to pass the farm onto their son or daughter,” said Hahn. “These folks are really interested in making sure that the younger generation is well positioned to take over the operation. Something like this diploma will assist in that.”
The ag community is very supportive of the program, Hahn added.
Timo Brielmann, a cash cropper from Rainy River district, wishes he had access to a similar program when he was in school.
Learning about cost breakdown “would have been really, really helpful” when he was at university, Brielmann told Farms.com today.
What this course will offer “is what we do every day. All my Dad and I really talk about is (finances), this loan for this, and cost breakdowns … I went to the University of Guelph for four years, and you learn all the science, which you need, too. But after a while, farming is just get in the field and get it done.
“This would have been a program I would have thought about taking,” he added.
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