Photo courtesy of Alexa Groff

An Adair-Casey/Guthrie Center High School junior was one of about 200 students from around the world who attended this year’s World Food Prize Global Youth Institute in Des Moines.

2019 Guthrie County Fair Queen Taylor Lemke attended the three-day event this month with Alexa Groff as her teacher mentor. Lemke interacted with Nobel and World Food Prize laureates and discussed food security and agricultural issues with international experts. Lemke comments on the discussions, “It was just very eye opening to see how a convention like this can bring together all these different people from different backgrounds with different skills and try to come up with ways to sustain our future. Because we know our population is growing super, super fast and in order to support all these people we’re going to have to have a lot of collaboration. And that’s basically what the whole Global Youth Institute is about, as well as involving youth so the youth know that there is a place for them and they can do the things that adults are doing basically.”

To attend the Iowa and Global Youth Institutes, Lemke wrote a paper about sustainable farming and climate volatility in the the developing country Kiribati. While Lemke hopes to attend the Iowa Youth Institute next spring and next year’s Global Youth Institute, she is also applying for the prestigious Borlaug-Ruan iInternational iInternship, which gives students an all-expenses-paid, eight week hands-on experience working with world-renowned scientists and policymakers at leading research centers across the globe.