College students from across the United States converged on Kansas last week to take part in the annual North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture (NACTA) educational conference. Students from Ancilla, which now offers two agriculture degree programs in animal science and crop science, took part.
NACTA is a professional society that focuses on the scholarship of teaching and learning agriculture and related disciplines at the college level. Members of NACTA are from two-year and four-year colleges, public and private.
“It was an awesome and rewarding opportunity for Ancilla students. They were engaged and involved with ag students from around the country,” Ancilla College agriculture program director Tim McLochlin said.
Ancilla’s students competed in the Agribusiness Contest. It consisted of a presentation of a scenario about a farm operation that wanted to expand its operation to include an ‘Agro-tourism’ piece that would allow their son and daughter to become involved in the family operation.
“They had to wade through all types of financial information and develop a four minute presentation to a panel of judges for a business proposal,” McLochlin said.
“Their presentation was very well received and was the highest scoring presentation in the two-year division. We even did well against the leading ag schools. We were only outscored by Iowa State by 1 point. Ancilla ended up in 4th place overall. So for the smallest school, in their 1stattempt, I was very happy!” he said.
Ancilla students Dustin Kerckhove, Ainsleigh Adamson, Jenneal Brown, Bryan Thompson and Tyler Binkley all took part. They were able to talk with some of the country’s largest university agriculture program specialists about their post-Ancilla plans as well.
“We got to learn about different transfer programs where we can continue our education after Ancilla. We also got to learn some ways that we can shape and build our own program as we move into the future,” said freshman agriculture student Ainsleigh Adamson.
