The Ag Club, which is the oldest club on campus, is hoping to educate students about agriculture and gain more members in the near future.”We would like new members,” Jackie Cutrer, agriculture business junior and Ag Club president from Raceland, said. “We have probably around 30 right now.”

Last week the club, which began in 1949, held a Mini-Farm that hosted about 1,000 kids from pre-school to 3rd grade.

“We had buffalo, alligators, dairy cows and animals like that,” Cutrer said.

“Many kids live in cities and suburban areas, so they don’t get to see animals up close and personal,” Sarah Griffin, agriculture science junior and Ag Club treasurer, said.

The Mini-Farm gave children the chance to interact with animals they do not get to see everyday or perhaps have never seen before. This also gives the Ag Club members an opportunity to teach children where things such as meat and milk come from, according to Cutrer.

“It’s to show them that food doesn’t actually come from the grocery store,” Cutrer said. “It comes from people.”

Members of the club believe it is very important to be knowledgeable of what farmers do. According to Dwayne Melancon, agriculture business junior and Ag Club treasurer, a single farmer feeds an average of 130 people.

“A lot of young kids think that milk, eggs, vegetables and other things come from the store,” Melancon said. “They have no idea where produce comes from.”

“People don’t realize that farmers are the reason why everyone is living,” Cutrer said. “The grocery store is not where their food comes from. If you don’t know where it comes from then you don’t appreciate what we do.”

According to Cutrer, about 95 percent of the Ag Club’s members have participated in 4-H, Future Farmers of America or grew up surrounded by agriculture.

“I’ve farmed all my life,” Melancon said. “I’ve raised sugar cane, collected eggs, grown gardens and things like that.”

Farming is not the only occupation that is available to a person who gets an agriculture business degree. There are, according to Melancon, a lot of technological aspects to agriculture, too. Pharmaceutical is one of the opportunities a person can take with an agriculture business degree.

“Agriculture is not all about farming,” Griffin said.

Cutrer said, “It’s all about getting back to the simple parts of life. You’re doing something for your own life. It’s not leaving your life in the hands of somebody else. Without farmers you don’t have anything. Join the Ag Club!