My name is Gillian. I grew up on a dairy farm. We have Jerseys in southwest Quebec. I'm from Ormstown. I am the fourth child out of five in my family, and only one of my siblings is going into agriculture. My little brother is still in high school, so he has a chance, but he probably won't. So there you go: we only have one person out of the five kids going into agriculture.
So I grew up on a dairy farm, and both my parents work on the farm. They're full-time farmers. I've chosen to not go into agriculture partly because of seeing my parents; it's a big commitment, a full-time job. My dad doesn't get weekends, doesn't get time off. He goes out to the barn at night to check the cows, different things like that. It's a full-time job. It's not something I want to do.
But last summer, and now this summer, I've been working at the Agriculture Museum just beside Dow's Lake. That has given me the great experience--something that I've brought from 4-H--to share agriculture with other people. So 4-H has given me all sorts of different ways to see agriculture that's not just the Jersey farm that my parents work on. It has given me all sorts of different things.
I grew up showing dairy calves, mostly Jerseys. I showed one Brown Swiss one summer. But I've also done square dancing, judging, public speaking, life skills, handicrafts--all sorts of stuff like that.
Provincially, 4-H has offered me many different options, including opportunities to go out and see different types of agriculture in my area and around Quebec. In Quebec, we have an “innovative ag” tour. It's held in different regions every year, and we go there to see different things. We see dairy farms, we see dairy farms with sheep, we see bull testation farms, we see alpacas. We get to see a lot of different things that you wouldn't normally see, and we also get to see how different people got into agriculture. So it really opens up your opportunities and kind of shows you the different things you can do.
With Quebec 4-H we have provincial rallies. There, all the 4-H projects get to come, whether you're an agriculture project or a life skills project. Again, all the members get introduced to all the different animals--horse, dairy, and so on. It's really nice, because coming from my area, it's a lot of dairy, but at the provincial rally every summer you get to see the beef, you get to see the horses, the rabbits, and everything.
We also have a senior member weekend, which is for members from 16 to 21. It's a weekend that's a bit special for the senior members, a bit of a thank you. We also try to get speakers in to talk about different things in agriculture, different opportunities, different jobs. We try not to just talk about going home and milking on your dairy farm. 4-H has really opened up opportunities for young people to see different types of farms.
There are national programs that I've been a part of or have seen. We have interprovincial youth exchanges. I was lucky enough to go to Saskatchewan and spend a week on a beef ranch, which took me into a different setting in agriculture. There's also the Garfield Weston U.K .exchange My family hosted a delegate from the U.K., and we got to learn about how they farm, their different opportunities.
I'd like to quickly go over a presentation we did last year as the youth advisory committee. We were looking at 4-H and where the 4-H members are going. We're having some trouble retaining some of the older members. We want to keep them interested, and we're trying to see the difference between the people who are in 4-H and those who aren't and try to figure out why they're not in 4-H.
But most of these people...and it's the same with what we're looking at now for young farmers. You want the future of agriculture. Generally they're born between the 1980s and the turn of the millennium. This age group will be entering the agriculture industry in the next 10 years.
Now, a lot has changed for this generation--i.e., technology, the demographics of Canada, and an increase in environmental awareness and sustainability. One of the big things they're pushing is the “green-loving”, so you're talking about the ten-mile diet and recycling in schools. Organic is a really big thing now. You go to the grocery store and it always says “organic”. That's what a lot of people will go for if they don't understand the difference between organic and what's not organic.
We're communication obsessed. It's a really big thing. Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, cellphone, or MSN, there's no shortage of ways we can connect to each other.
I know that Quebec 4-H has a lot of our activities on Facebook to say what's coming up and say what's happening, because we know that's where our members are. We try to get people in by putting pictures up, different things like that, because we know that a lot of young people use it.
In terms of the current demographics, generally speaking, the people entering agriculture are people who have grown up on farms. They come from an agricultural background, so they're from the area; they have parents and family. That's a big part. The people entering agriculture are the people who came from it.
In terms of the demographics of those who are not entering agriculture, generally speaking they don't find agriculture to be a glamorous job. And in some ways it's not. You don't get weekends off, you have to get up to check the cows, and different things like that. They don't think they'll be able to make money, which is really important. They feel they don't understand enough about agriculture to become involved. And that is one of the really key roles of 4-H.