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Agricultural Youth Exchange connecting Kansas State University students with Taiwan

An agricultural youth exchange program at Kansas State University is helping students learn more about global agriculture.

Each year, thanks to a partnership between Kansas State University and Taiwan’s National Chung Hsing University, six students spend a week traveling abroad. Junior agriculture education major Katie Cummings traveled with the program in 2023.

“It was such an eye-opening experience. Food safety and animal science practices are so different because of the limited space they have and what they can grow is really limited as well,” she says.

Cummings says one thing she learned is that food safety is lax in Taiwan.

“I was going to a night market and it’s so crowded and this man took my money with the same hand he handed me my food with and it wasn’t even like he had gloves on,” she says. “I think a lot of that is because they’re not largely exporting goods. They’re mainly importing goods.”

Cummings says tomatoes are also grown very differently in Taiwan.

“Instead of letting the tomatoes kind of grow up and out like we do with a tomato cage, they train the tomato to kind of vine up like a cattle panel in their greenhouses,” she says.

Dana Ladner, with the Kansas Department of Agriculture, tells Brownfield Taiwan is the state’s sixth largest trading partner and this program helps continue to develop relationships between the two countries.

“In 2023, Kansas exported $193 million in ag products to Taiwan. A lot of that goes with red meat and at the oil seed industry,” she says.

According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Taiwan’s ag exports totaled $5 billion in 2023, while imports totaled $19 billion.   

Students from National Chung Hsing University will travel to Kansas in the spring. K-State students selected for the exchange will then travel to Taiwan in August. The annual trip is coordinated by the Kansas Department of Agriculture and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Denver, Colorado

Applications for the 2025 Taiwan Agricultural Youth Exchange are being accepted through Nov. 15. A link to the application page can be found at Brownfield Ag News dot com.

Photo: Kansas delegates from left: Jack Arender, Katie Cummings, Annika Wiebers, Corley Becker, Rachel Sebesta and Alex Scovill at Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall in Taiwan. The students traveled in November 2023 as part of the Taiwan Agricultural Youth Exchange. (Courtesy Kansas State University Division of Communications and Marketing)

AUDIO: Katie Cummings, Kansas State University student

AUDIO: Dana Ladner, Kansas Department of Agriculture