Colleges are dropping many ag programs because they no longer have students, which has nothing to do with whether jobs are out there. A friend who's a leading weed researcher and prof at a Southern school said a couple of years ago that his university no longer produces enough ag graduates in weed science to populate his programs for advanced degrees.

Several academics have told me in the last couple of years that if I know of any promising people looking for a masters degree to let them know because they'll have openings going forward.

People in industry and academia keep telling me that they're having trouble finding qualified U.S.-born applicants for jobs in certain fields, like plant pathology.

Ag majors also are steering into such programs as bioengineering and genetics because they see those as big-money career paths.