Alumni

International Trips - Russia 2006

K-State’s Master of Agribusiness program continued the offer of international travel with a two-week trip focused on Russian agriculture with stops in Moscow, Tula and St. Petersburg.

A group of 24 MAB students and alumni, faculty and staff, and other agriculturalists traveled to Russia and participated in the second MAB international food and agribusiness trip. During the 12-day tour, the group visited various agricultural and food related facilities including a dairy farm and broiler facility. The tour also included visits to Cargill's refined vegetable oil and sweetener plant in Efremov and a Caterpillar welding facility in St. Petersburg, as well as presentations by representatives from Monsanto and the Analytical Centre of Agri-Food Economics in Moscow. Participants learned about Russian agricultural education during visits to Moscow State Agroengineering and St. Petersburg State Agrarian universities. Time was also set aside for sightseeing the many historical sights in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Why Russia?
Russia occupies more than one tenth of the agricultural land on earth including very large areas of black soils, with very favorable climactic conditions with enormous production and efficiency potentials. The Russian population however, represents less than 2.5 percent of the world population. Therefore, Russia may become a main supplier of world food markets. The increase of yield in the production of grain of about one ton per hectare seems to be realistic, and would flood another 50 million tons of grain on to the world markets. This would almost equal the sum of North American exports.

Join us for our 4th international trip as we travel to Australia and New Zealand. The trip is tentatively scheduled for April 16 - May 2010. More information will be available soon. If you'd like to be added to our interest list, please email mjbowen@ksu.edu or call 785-532-4435.