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Students learn from dairy farm mentorship program

A dairy farmer group is using a mentorship program to expose young people to possible dairy careers.

Tracy Probst with Professional Dairy Producers tells Brownfield it’s an opportunity for college and technical school students to shadow a dairy farmer for eight hours and also attend the PDPW business conference.  “They will be filling out an application, and on that application, it kind of asks what they want to experience on a farm.  Sometimes we’ll give them what they want, and other times, we’ll feel like we want to push them out of their comfort zone and experience something new.”

Probst says they’ve had students from Wisconsin, eastern Iowa, and northern Illinois take part in past mentorship programs, and many students had no prior agricultural experience.  “We’ve had a lot of non-farm students who have never really experienced the dairy farms that they’ve been on or they had a picture of what a dairy farm was and it’s nothing like they experienced or thought it was going to be, and it’s really opened their eyes to the opportunities in the dairy industry.”

Probst says the dairy farmer mentors are also learning a lot from the students.

The dairy mentorship program applications can be found online at PWPW.org.  The application deadline for the next round of mentorships is November 15^th.