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Show Agriculture's Sowing Seeds For Bumper Crop Of Careers .J J 1 . MMBIttV.l New developments in agriculture agricul-ture create more than just new products and new markets for farm commodities. They also open up new career opportunities. opportuni-ties. Take Richard Percy and Judy Green, for example. Both are involved in-volved in work at Texas A&M University stemming from a relatively new development in cotton: glandless plants. Richard, a graduate student, is involved in plant breeding studies on glandless cotton and hopes to continue similar lines of research with a private firm after graduation. Judy's field is food technology, technol-ogy, and she's helping develop new uses for protein extracts from glandless cottonseed. In contrast to standard varieties va-rieties of cotton, the new breed is free of the pigment glands that have long deterred full use of cottonseed protein for human hu-man food. And, even though a new process separates the glands from the protein in regular regu-lar varieties, the new glandless is still highly desirable because of the shortcut it offers. "Already, about 56,600 acres of glandless cotton are being grown in Texas alone," Richard says, "and farmers so far have been getting a premium price for their glandless cottonseed. "Another benefit we hope to turn up for farmers is built-in insect resistance for some of the glandless strains," Richard notes. Dr. Carl M. Cater of A&M's Food Protein Research and Development De-velopment Center says his researchers re-searchers work closely with the scientists who are perfecting improved varieties of the new cotton. "This one development is opening up career choices that didn't even exist a few years ago," Dr. Cater says, "and, as the technology of glandless cottonseed progresses, there'll be even more opportunities." Couple the technological revolution rev-olution with the growing interest in-terest in a more natural lifestyle life-style and you begin to see why agricultural enrollment is growing grow-ing faster than Iowa corn. The 1975 graduating class at the University of Maryland, for example, had a record 240 graduates grad-uates picking up sheepskins in agriculture. And most of them didn't come from "down on the farm," but from the metropolitan metropol-itan area of Washington, D.C. Job placement for ag graduates gradu-ates is running about 95, according ac-cording to officials of 14 Midwestern Mid-western universities. And the pay scale averages $9,200 a year second only to that of graduates in engineering. engineer-ing. Some 260 different careers for ag college graduates are listed by the U.S. Labor Department, De-partment, and there are considerably con-siderably more in the agricultural agricul-tural support industries. v . If the technological explosion produces other innovations as . promising as glandless cottonseed, cotton-seed, it could boost demand for agriculture grads even more. FUTURE GENETICIST Graduate Grad-uate Student Richard Percy of Texas A&M studies cotton plants in preparation for a career ca-reer in developing new varieties. vari-eties. His special interest is glandless cotton, a relatively recent development that has opened up new career opportunities oppor-tunities in agriculture. i1 I JL c ?i ( 1 O :,lMi I As Judy Green puts it: "The exciting thing about my work . is that we are able to see now an entirely new source of high-" grade human food products from a plant that already is the most important source of fiber. There's really a hungry world waiting for cottonseed protein." With the world waiting, scientists sci-entists are looking for new ways to grow more, use it better, bet-ter, and distribute it faster. PROMISING NEW DEVELOPMENT Food Technologist Judy Green is seeking ways to use new high-protein extracts from the seeds of glandless cotton plants. Utilization of new agricultural agri-cultural discoveries is creating many new careers in food science that offer positions of service. , |