Land O’Lakes interns visit Fremont, learn about future

FREMONT – For Johnny Sabel and Jacquelyn Brown, the time is now to look at global food trends and how to feed a projected world population of nearly 10 billion people by 2050.

The two college students are nearing the end of their year-long fellowships with Land O’Lakes Inc. as part of the company’s Emerging Leaders for Food Security program, and their search for future ideas brought them to Fremont’s Sunrise Cooperative offices last week.

Brown, a Purdue University sophomore and Medford, Oregon, resident, said she and Sabel spent a couple of days touring the Sunrise facility and got a comprehensive view on how the cooperative runs its business.

“I had heard a lot about how technology is a big deal in agriculture right now, but I had not seen it firsthand,” Brown said of the tours, adding later, “I think Sunrise is doing a lot of awesome things to move agriculture forward.”

Sabel, a University of Minnesota student, said he and Brown sat in on some meetings between Sunrise officials and area farmers and learned a lot about their day-to-day business concerns.

He said area farmers were interested in growing more food to feed more people in the world and took a long-term approach to taking care of their land.

“They want to be sustainable,” he said.

Brown said that local farmers had a lot of awareness about GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and global fertilizer regulations.

“I think they are aware of how their product fits into an international scale,” Brown said.

Sabel and Brown’s Land O’Lakes fellowships started in October 2014, and they will soon meet with industry experts and give presentations on what they have learned during their year of travel and study.

The company started its food security fellowship program in 1981.

Part of their fellowships included a trip to Africa, where the two students traveled to South Africa, Malawi, Zambia and Botswana and met with subsistence farmers in those countries.

Sabel said the visit to those countries revealed a lot of differences in how farmers there approach agriculture compared to their U.S. counterparts.

Brown said farmers in those countries were more focused on just raising enough crops to feed their families, as opposed to an average Ohio farmer that’s looking at the broader business implications of managing a farm of several hundred acres.

dacarson@gannett.com

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Twitter:@DanielCarson7.