Podcast Episode 99

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Affecting Change Through Ag… The Possibilities Are Endless.

Affecting Change Through Ag… The Possibilities Are Endless.

Episode 99 | 23 min

With Guest:

Dr. Amy Kaleita, Agriculture & Biosystems Engineering Department Chair of Iowa State University

What kind of students are seeking out careers in ag? It isn’t just kids on the farm anymore. Jamie catches up with Dr. Amy Kaleita, Department Chair of the Ag and Biosystems Engineering at Iowa State University. They discuss how education is furthering the world of agriculture, why students are choosing career paths in ag, and how the opportunities to create change in the industry are endless.

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People can use their talents to make a change in the world. In agriculture, there’s a million ways to do that.

— Dr. Amy Kaleita

Guest Bio

Dr. Amy Kaleita is the Chair of the Department of Agriculture and Biosystems Engineering at Iowa State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an expert in soil and water conservation and management. Dr. Kaleita’s research focuses on information technology for precision conservation. Her primary interests are remote sensing, crop and hydrologic modeling, precision farming, and advanced analytical methods for understanding the influence of spatiotemporally variable soil and hydrologic properties.

Speaker 1 (00:01):

Well, welcome to The Water Table Podcast. We’re back here at Iowa State University. Dr. Amy Kaleita with me here and just read a little bit about Dr. Kaleita’s bio. She is the chair of the Department of Agriculture and Biosystems Engineering at the Iowa State University. She holds a PhD in Agricultural engineering from the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana. She is an expert in soil and water conservation and management. So thank you for being here. We should have a fun conversation today.

Dr. Amy Kaleita (00:39):

Yeah, yeah. I’m looking forward to it and thank you for the opportunity.

Speaker 1 (00:41):

So are you a native Iowan?

Dr. Amy Kaleita (00:43):

I’m not. I’m originally from Pennsylvania, but in a couple years we will flip to having lived in Iowa longer than I lived anywhere else.

Speaker 1 (00:53):

Oh, wow.

Dr. Amy Kaleita (00:53):

I think of myself as being from here. When I’m out traveling, people say, “Where are you from?”

Speaker 1 (00:58):

Were you kind of born and raised in the agricultural setting?

Dr. Amy Kaleita (01:01):

Not at all. I was definitely a latecomer to agriculture, if you consider college to be late for that and for a lot of people it is.

Speaker 1 (01:12):

For sure.

Dr. Amy Kaleita (01:13):

I was just really interested in science and technology and math, and I was told, “You should do engineering because it’s a great career path and very stable.” And I’d never met an engineer and I had no idea what they did and neither did my parents. My dad was like, “I think mechanical engineers make cars. I don’t know what they all do, but you’ll figure it out.” And I was like, “I don’t want to make cars.” But I went to Penn State. I’m originally from Pennsylvania and that’s where I could afford to go, and they had an agricultural engineering program that I had had a little bit of an introduction to through some kind of special program that I’d done in high school.

(01:53):

And I thought, “Those seem like cool people and also that major seems really broad. I’ll get to taste a little bit of everything. I’ll have the machine stuff in there, there’ll be environmental stuff in there, there’ll be sensors and programming, and then I’ll figure out what I like.” And it turns out that what I liked was all of it applied to very important fundamental problems. Food, very important and fundamental, clean air, clean water, healthy environment, super important and fundamental, so that nexus of fun, really exciting, interesting technology and engineering applied to really important fundamental problems was really a draw for me, so I was definitely years into my college program before I really started to think, “Hey, maybe this was a great choice from the outset and not just something I would do well at.” I was figuring out what the better choice was.

Speaker 1 (02:52):

So this is kind of why I like doing podcasts because I don’t know where they’re going, and you ask a question and it spurs other thoughts. But one of the questions I was going to ask is just careers for young kids and where they should go, and I was going to ask that independent of the fact of how you answered the first part of the questions around, you seem quite passionate about this because probably of your own story, right?

Dr. Amy Kaleita (03:16):

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there’s a lot of young folks who want… Well, and everybody really, wants to be able to use their talents and the things that they’re excited about to make change and make the world better, and in agriculture, there’s a million different ways of doing that. And I think sometimes, especially young folks who didn’t grow up in an ag environment like me, maybe not thinking of that as a career path. They might not know about all the stuff that’s in there and all the different ways that you could apply your skills to really change the world. And it’s been very great for me to be able to talk to students who are like, “I think I’m interested in food systems, but I don’t know anything about how to get into doing that.” Or, “I think I’m really interested in environmental health and quality and I don’t know how to access that. Do I need to be an environmental engineer? Do I need to?” So there’s so many ways to get into that space and I appreciate being in a position where I can have those conversations with young folks.

Speaker 1 (04:28):

Sure, sure, sure. What do you usually tell them in regards to… When I hear that, and I think back to my story, and I think it’s kind of everybody’s story around, “I don’t know enough about that to say that’s really what I want to do.” But isn’t it really about just how you can or you can’t connect with people and how some of us are wired in a way in which that’s more important than others, so really steering them in those directions?

Dr. Amy Kaleita (04:59):

Yeah, absolutely. Gosh, I think it is crazy to think that maybe we ask people who are just 18 or 19 or maybe they just graduated from high school, “Commit to something and do it for the rest of your life.” That’s crazy. How would anybody… I am still discovering things that like, “Oh, would I have enjoyed doing that as a career? Oh, I might’ve liked to be this.” I’m still finding things that I didn’t know existed as a career path, and I’m almost 50 years old, so to think about we ask 18 and 19 year olds to be making those decisions.

(05:33):

I think, one thing that’s really important is talk to a lot of people as you’re making those decisions. And it’s not just 18 and 19 year olds either, I should say, it’s anybody who feels like, “I am maybe looking for just the right spot for me.” Whether that’s through education or through a career pivot or other things. I think, talking to people, thinking about yourself and what are the things that you are the most passionate about, both subject matter, but also the way that you want to engage with the world. Are you, like me, really spreadsheets and making apps and programs? And I also really want to see that the world is physically a better place from some of the work that I have done, so for me, that kind of points me in a particular direction, but I know that there are a lot of people for whom they are maybe really passionate about connecting with people.

(06:28):

Then we think about, “Did you know that extension is a path for you?” And that’s a career where you can connect with people and enable them through knowledge that you’re transmitting and learning that you’re helping them have to make the world a better place. So just the more you talk to people and the more you understand different pathways and different ways to meet your goals or to have an impact on the world, the better you understand all of the million ways that you could contribute to making things better.

Speaker 1 (07:00):

Right, right. On Water Table, we talk a lot about water quality and water quality education. You guys at Iowa State talk a lot about that. What do you see as just some of the logical or even emerging career paths for students around water quality and water quality education?

Dr. Amy Kaleita (07:20):

Yeah, absolutely. There’s definitely science and technology types of education and I mean, three out of the four majors that we offer in this department have a pathway to connecting with water and water quality, agricultural engineering, biological systems engineering, ag systems, technology. And then we’ve got partners around campus that are coming at it also from the science space. There’s water that happens in civil and environmental engineering. There’s soil and water health that happens in Department of Agronomy and soil science and environmental science, so there’s a lot of science-based pathways that would really depend on a person’s like, “What particular type of science and technology do you enjoy the most?”

(08:05):

But there’s also a lot of social science ways to have impact in that space. There’s people who are in a sociology place, where they’re working to understand around water quality and soil conservation. There’s folks who are economists, who are looking at how do people value water quality and soil health, and how could we improve getting conservation practices out on the landscape by designing policies and incentive structures that are more helpful. I think, just my mind goes first to maybe the science and engineering based, but also I have worked with enough people to know that there’s all kinds of ways to get into that just based on what a person enjoys doing the most.

Speaker 1 (08:50):

Sure, sure. What do you see, what gets you excited, I guess, about today’s student? I’m sure you’ve been here a while, in fact, I-

Dr. Amy Kaleita (09:03):

Thanks.

Speaker 1 (09:03):

Well, I talked to one of your colleagues and one of them that happens to be on The Water Table often, and he’s a little bit older than you. We’ll see if you can figure out who that is, but he said that both you and him have been here and are toward the top of the food chain now on the whole faculty side,-

Dr. Amy Kaleita (09:23):

Yeah, 20 years, yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:24):

… so this is great. That’s great. But that student has changed right?

Dr. Amy Kaleita (09:28):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:28):

In 20 years and what the students are looking for, so what gets you excited about what you see in today’s student?

Dr. Amy Kaleita (09:36):

Yeah. Not to say that students 20 years ago were not motivated by lofty goals of making the world a better place, but it is a more recurring theme that we hear with today’s students. They’re a little bit less motivated by money. They don’t necessarily expect that they’re going to find a company to work for that’s going to be their whole career. They’re a little bit more comfortable with the idea that there might be a lot of pivot points or redirections in their career, but this, I think, makes them very kind of open-minded about all of the different pathways that they could take.

(10:16):

Sometimes that can be very overwhelming. It’s a lot easier if you could just be like, “Nope, there’s just one pathway for me, boop, it’s it, and I’m going to take these classes you told me these are the ones that take, and then I’m going to graduate, get that job and stay in it for the rest of my life.” They’re not really thinking about things that way. They also want to be picking and choosing different courses to really customize the type of work that they’re doing, so it’s really exciting that they feel that level of ownership over their education and that level of agency over the path that they take. But at the same time, it does mean that they often need more advice and need to talk to more people than just locking into a particular major and just following the instructions for that major. So I’m excited about sense of the extent to which they believe the world is their oyster and they can chart their own path.

(11:07):

I’m a little bit daunted though because then that means that everybody’s doing a slightly different thing and we need to make sure, as faculty and university folks, that we’re enabling that and making it viable for them to do that level of customizing and giving them that kind of advice and giving them access to people that they can talk to as they’re figuring it out.

(11:27):

And they also just keep me passionate because they’re always so curious. And that’s been the case for a long time. That’s the best part of teaching is that the students are asking questions and sometimes you’re like, “We’ll ask. I never thought about that. Let’s go find out together.” So I’m constantly in a state of learning myself from just the questions that the students are asking and the things that they are thinking of, so that’s always very exciting.

Speaker 1 (11:53):

Yeah, we just recorded another podcast and talked a little bit about curiosity and how it’s so important that, when you get a little bit complacent and you stop asking questions, how things come at you really a lot faster than what you expect them to and how things change around you much faster than what you expect them to, if you’re not asking questions and being curious about why does this work this way?

Dr. Amy Kaleita (12:20):

Yeah. Sometimes a good question just unlocks a box and all of a sudden there’s all these things coming out of it and all of these pathways to do new things and understand connections and make positive change just because you asked a question.

Speaker 1 (12:34):

It must be fun to work in an environment like this because I think so much of society, when they get to be, I’ll say, our age, it’s easy to get frustrated with the younger generation because we don’t see it the way where you can see it every day and how, yeah, they are kind of wanting a custom plan for themselves, but that can be misunderstood into something else.

Dr. Amy Kaleita (13:01):

Yeah, absolutely. I think the jaded, skeptical way to think about it would be, “Oh, they all believe that they are so special and so unique.” But they are special and unique and aren’t all of us. But the exciting way to think about it is to see that they really want to be able to use their skills and the things that they’re passionate about to improve the state of the world around them, and that gives me a lot of hope for the future that we continue to have people coming into college and other places to access knowledge who are really excited and curious and really wanting to make change.

Speaker 1 (13:43):

And that’s what makes what you do, what I do, at Prinsco, so fun because it’s something that actually does make a difference. It’s not like we’re making… I’ve used this example many times, but at Prinsco we don’t manufacture a toy that somebody’s going to get at Christmas and it’s going to be broke by March anyway. It’s something that can provide wealth for generations on the farm when you install pipe, and it creates a larger crop, which creates tax dollars, which the tax dollars build hospitals and schools and communities, and now, if we can do that with adding new technology of water quality practices and saturated buffers and bioreactors and all these things that are coming that we don’t even know what they are yet, it’s something that’s easy for kids that want to make a difference to feel passionate about.

Dr. Amy Kaleita (14:36):

100% I totally agree, and I see that in my own line of work as well that there’s the thing that we’re actually doing, which is educating students, but then there’s all the things that happen because we’re doing that, that are really exciting and make me feel like, at the end of the day when I go home from work, yeah, something good has happened because of the work that we’re doing here, so that’s deeply satisfying.

Speaker 1 (14:59):

Sure. Sure, sure. What are some things you’re thinking about as you’re at that stage in your life where you’ve been here a while, you’re starting to get to the second half of your career, that you want to see accomplished either personally or at Iowa State?

Dr. Amy Kaleita (15:18):

Yeah, something I’m really interested in currently is where are the opportunities to take all of the long history of being oriented towards learning and change that we have traditionally applied, mostly to undergraduate and graduate students and to some extent to extension partners, but how do we take those things that we have learned and make the things that are happening at universities like Iowa State more accessible to more of the public? Should we be thinking more about short courses and trainings that other people? Maybe they’re not interested in getting a whole degree, but we’re expert in something that we could share with them, and how do we find those partnerships and really be there for the state of Iowa in more ways than just, “Oh, you have to come to one of our programs.” Or, “You have to sign on for a full degree.” Or, “You pay tuition for a full class.” There might be smaller nuggets where we can help move the needle on a lot of different things by sharing that expertise a little bit more broadly, so I’m really interested in that.

(16:31):

I continue to be very interested in what is the future of graduate education. I think, back in the midst of time before even I arrived at a university, the idea of research as an academic pursuit was already on the way. And certainly today, most of our students, who come for graduate school, don’t go into academic careers when they leave. And how can we make sure that the graduate education provides that firm foundation in research, which is really about discovery, and how do we encapsulate new knowledge and develop new things and test them and vet them appropriately, but then give them the skills to be able to deploy them in a much wider range of situations than just an academic pursuit.

(17:19):

I think, we’re going to see a lot more diverse interests in people coming in for graduate school, and we’re already seeing that, so how do we give them the skills that they need rather than just carving a groove that assumes that they will follow the kind of path that I’ve taken. Those are two areas. They’re both really just about making sure our education is more accessible, more valuable, adding more to the economy and health of the state and the region that we operate in.

Speaker 1 (17:48):

I don’t know if I should assume this or not, but I assume that when you went through schooling, you were untraditional from the standpoint you didn’t come from an agricultural background and ended in, is that still the same or is there a lot more kids that are coming from a non-agricultural background that are going into this industry?

Dr. Amy Kaleita (18:05):

Yeah, there’s more now than there were. Now, I mean, I was in a very small program and I was one of only two kids in my graduating class that was not from a farm, and I was one of only two women in my class, and I was the only one that was both, so I felt really like a fish out of water. And we still have relatively low percentages of women in our engineering and technology majors within ag. There’s more students now, I think, than there were a generation ago who are not from a farming background, but even those students are often maybe a generation separated or maybe their uncle runs the farm and they worked on it in summers even though they didn’t grow up on a farm.

(18:53):

But it’s still a point where the students recognize that that’s a little bit of a identity kind of thing. Sometimes they’ll be out somewhere with students and they’re introducing themselves to maybe prospective students or undeclared majors. And they’ll often start with, “I am or am not from a farm.” So they definitely feel that that’s a key piece of who they are and how they relate to these majors. I think it is challenging because a lot of our really ag-based majors were designed with an assumption that people were coming in with an ag background, and when you don’t have that, how are our courses responding? How is our education responding?

Speaker 1 (19:40):

Can understand that, yeah.

Dr. Amy Kaleita (19:42):

Being in engineering, I think it’s funny because my colleagues who are aerospace engineers, it’s not like they would introduce themselves to somebody, “Hey, I’m an aerospace engineer.” And somebody would ask them, “Did you grow up on the space station?” So it’s an unusual thing I think for agriculture that the assumption is that people were kind of rooted in that from childhood. I don’t know that all of our educational programs have really caught up to that diversity, but it’s only going to become more important. I mean, the population of people who literally grow up on a farm gets smaller and smaller every year, so we are drawing in more students who care about those kinds of issues, but might not know the language to use to describe why they care about it or how they care about it, and how are we making our educational programs attractive to students who are really interested in those things and just don’t know to describe it as agriculture.

Speaker 1 (20:40):

Yeah, and I would assume that, like you say, the people that grow up on farms is becoming smaller and smaller and the industry is actually becoming bigger and bigger because of all the other things like water quality that we’re having to spend more time on, and we need jobs in those areas. I don’t know if you have the answer, but I wonder if other schools that aren’t as much in an agricultural state, like Iowa State, that have good agricultural programs, have less percentage of their students that grew up on a farm? I don’t know that.

Dr. Amy Kaleita (21:17):

Yeah. I think it’s a national trend, and it is also true that because there are so many other industries that are working around agriculture and supporting agriculture, even though there’s not as many people who are literally on the farm working, there are schools that have not traditionally had agriculture programs that are starting to launch things that are very similar in those spaces because of the demands of the market for that kind of expertise and skill. That’s an interesting thing too, when you think that we might be looking at the next generation, where the people who are really active in those spaces out in the workforce, not only didn’t come from a farm, but may not have been educated in a kind of curriculum or career path where they used agricultural words to describe what they were doing. Yeah, so it’s an interesting time to be in agriculture, it is no less important, and there are no fewer jobs and career paths. In fact, there are more but fewer students who are arriving at our colleges with that kind of language and self-described interest from the outside.

Speaker 1 (22:32):

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, thank you Dr. Kaleita for being here. It was fun. It was fun to visit and to just hear your passion, not only for what you do and your career here at Iowa State, but for how you want to connect to the next generation and help them and serve them to get to where they want to be in their lives,-

Dr. Amy Kaleita (22:55):

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 (22:55):

… so thank you for what you do here, for being part of The Water Table and hope to visit more in the future.

Dr. Amy Kaleita (23:00):

Yeah, you’re welcome.