Farmscape for September 28, 2011   (Episode 3673)

The Dean of University of Manitoba's Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences says the new Bruce D. Campbell Farm and Food Discovery offers the information the public will need to make informed decisions about the role of agriculture and its future.

The University of Manitoba's Bruce D. Campbell Farm and Food Discovery Centre, located about ten minutes drive south of Winnipeg, was officially opened earlier this month.

Dr. Michael Trevan, the Dean of the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, says the centre's hands on displays and activities tell the story of the science involved in making modern food production more economically and environmentally sustainable and more healthy.

Clip-Dr. Michael Trevan-University of Manitoba:
The Bruce D. Campbell Farm and Food Discovery Centre is our attempt at public outreach about the science and technology of modern agriculture, modern sustainable agriculture, to the public in general but particularly to urban people who may not have had the experience of farming and farm production and the food chain right through to their supper plate.

We've aimed this at a level that ought to be accessible by everybody so it's not just for school kids.

It's for the general public at large, it's for interested people no matter what their ages.

The language of the display is written at the level of about grades 6 or 7 only because this is a language that is accessible to 99 percent of the population.

This is part of a message to say there's a lot of issues in modern agriculture, should be using fertilizers or should we be going organic, does agriculture pollute the water supply or not.

We're not providing the answers.

We're trying to point to those issues and provide information so that people can go away and make up their own minds.

Dr. Trevan acknowledges, although the farm and food discovery centre is designed to be of interest to all ages, the majority of users are expected to be grades 5 to 8 school children, the generation that will face the massive problem of growth in the world's population and how they're going to be fed and if they're not engaged in that at this stage then it's going to be too late.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council