農家さんへの訪問【A visit to a dairy farm】

農業科学者の責任は、あたりまえですが、農業を良くすることです。私はそれを忘れたくない、といつも思っています。

今回は、清水町の酪農家さんをインタビューする機会がありました。北大農学部生は驚くべきことですが、酪農家さんと直接接するチャンスはほとんど無いようです。私が農学部生だったころは、常日頃から農家さんと接していました。農家さんに話を聞いたり、農家を訪問したりすることは、農学の基本中の基本ですから、今後農学部の教育にももっともっと取り込んでいきたいところです。

I have not written any article for a while so there are plenty of things that I want to write here. I will do so one by one. One of the main themes of our research is to do something which directly benefit farmers. Thus, we often go out to interview farmers. For me and for my students, visits to farms are crucial to conduct our research.

As an agricultural scientist, I want to make the agricultural systems better. I try to remind this to myself every now and then.

This time, I visited a dairy farm with my students. Surprisingly, agricultural students at our University have few chances to directly talk with local farmers. When I was a student, I had so many chances to visit different types of farms so I really want to include more and more farm visits to our education systems for here at Hokkaido University.