Our Underestimated Culture : Agriculture
College-decision making is one of the most important phase in life, for most people. That’s why it is such a big deal and when you decide on studying anything other than engineering and pre-medical, people question you. I’ve seen my friends being underestimated because they decide to study agriculture. People assume that they don’t need a degree to farm lands on the contrary, agriculture involves complex steps other than the stereotypical farming activity on land. Ironically, agriculture is one of the contributing key sectors to Indonesia’s economy but the citizens know very little about it.
When you read the word “agriculture”, I’m sure the two things that come up to your mind are green wide lands and also farmers. Agriculture is the art, science and activity of cultivating land to produce crops for human needs. It takes a long process and teamwork so that you can eat on a daily basis. Technology and creativity also plays an important role in agriculture and that is why the agriculture industry keeps on innovating, finding new ways of farming. Modern agriculture involves digital tools and data to improve efficiency for example; GPS on the farm and weather trackers. All the modern technology doesn’t mean that it can replace human force, agriculture professions such as bioprocessing engineer, production manager, quality assurance (and many more to mention) are greatly needed to improve our agriculture system so I don’t see why people look down on agriculture students.
Agriculture, as we all know is an important part of our socio-economic growth. With the growing number of population, food needs also increases and agriculture plays a significant importance on providing food from Sabang until Merauke. Looking back at our history, agriculture is one of the skills that is transferred from generations to make a living, it is a culture. As mentioned above, agriculture sector contributes greatly to our economic growth and image in the international stage
Like any other sectors, agriculture also faces some challenges and problems here in Indonesia. Rural areas in Indonesia lack of strong infrastructures and facilities and this results to very high transportation cost from rural areas to market access. According to Bank Indonesia, the main problems in agriculture sector are capacity, farmers productivity, farmers incentive and unclear data. All of those problems results in changes in policy making.
Youth needs to sometime back off from their gadgets, take a moment to explore our natural resources and potential. Agriculture is an underestimated sector in this modern era but on the contrary, technological advances can improve agriculture system. Besides economical benefits, it also has significant social impacts so it is safe to say that agriculture is a culture itself