Future Agriculturists: Czech and U.S. Agricultural Students’ Attitudes Towards Agriculture

Abstract

Abstract The future of agriculture in the EU is endangered by a constantly diminishing number of young skilled agricultural workers starting their career in agribusiness. The problem of not pursuing in the agricultural career after the university graduation forced us to compare different attitudes of students from the USA (Ohio State University) and the Czech Republic (Czech University of Life Sciences Prague). The article deals with the attitudes towards agriculture in two groups of agriculture university students (n = 201). The data were collected with the use of a standardized Questionnaire on Measuring the Affective and Cognitive Properties of Attitudes. The results of Man-Whitney test indicate that both groups of students show significantly more the affective than the cognitive base of their attitude. Furthermore, U.S. students display more positive attitudes towards the agriculture workers than Czech students. Authors bring forward the issue of attitudes in an attempt to find a way to influence the decision making of skilled agri-graduates to prefer the field of agribusiness over other careers and propose to focus on a change in attitudes, for example by the increase of the level of practical experience with agribusiness in school farm estates.