Making a Difference on Two Continents

When he returned to his native country, Nigeria for seven months as a Fulbright Scholar, Stanislaus State's Roland Starn Endowed Chair and Director of Agriculture Oluwarotimi Odeh found homecoming quite revealing and fulfilling.

Not only were the students in his entrepreneurship class at his alma mater, Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA) in Ondo State, amazed to hear what the United States was actually like, his former professors, many now retired, treated him with an embarrassing level of deference.

"Some of them were unduly respectful," Odeh said. "I said, 'You don't need to call me professor. I'm your student.' It also taught me a lesson. However far you go in life, the most important thing you can do is pull people behind you along and celebrate with them when they move past you. That's what we pray for, that some of our students grow up to be better than us. That's the main job of education. You sow that seed to grow to be something bigger than you."

Odeh is trying to sow those seeds on two continents, his native Africa and his adopted North America, where he came in 2001 to pursue a doctorate in agricultural economics at Kansas State University. And he's not just educating students but also mentoring fellow faculty members. During a recent talk about his Fulbright experience, Odeh encouraged colleagues to pursue overseas teaching opportunities.

"If you are thinking about it, please, seize the opportunity," he told them. "I always thought I wasn't going to be able to take a trip like this and when it came, I had to jump at it. It's an opportunity that will change you. It won't just change your scholarship, but it will change your perspective. You are needed in some of these places."

Nigeria is just one such place. Odeh's experience helped lead to a Memo of Understanding (MOU) between Stan State and FUTA for more student and faculty exchanges. But he's not stopping there. He's joining forces with Kari Knutson Miller, Dean of International Education and Global Engagement, to build Stan State's global footprint.

Being back in his homeland for seven months reminded Odeh there is work to be done there.

His position there - which allowed him and his wife, Bukky, to visit his 87-year-old mother and allow their two pre-school aged children to meet her - was to answer a mandate from the country's government to establish entrepreneurship courses to help battle high unemployment in the country.

With agriculture second to petroleum in Nigeria's gross domestic product (GDP), Odeh's expertise is valued.

"Probably 60 to 70 percent of the population relies on agriculture," Odeh said. "Almost every area has farms, very small and not as advanced as we have here, but that's an opportunity for tremendous growth."

Using available resources and creativity was a major lesson in entrepreneurship Odeh taught when he divided his class of 87 students into groups of four or five students and gave each 500 Nigerian Naira, worth about 30 cents, and told them to start a business.

One group turned the 500 Naira into 16,500 by selling pencils and pens to students in their classes. Now, the group has set up a LinkedIn page and YouTube video as it looks to expand its empire.

Though that team didn't create an ag product, this lesson in bootstrapping demonstrated the steps needed to construct a profitable business.

Creating one's own path, Odeh taught, is a viable option for students. Adapting evolving technologies for Nigerian farms will take ingenuity as well as making creative use of available resources.

Odeh's work didn't end in the classroom during his Nigerian stay. He was invited to the U.S. Embassy to make a presentation and noticed other universities had information and promotional materials about their programs available to visitors. Stan State is now planning to have such information there.

"Ag is not just a privilege but a responsibility. I think that responsibility is what our institution should feel. We have a responsibility to prepare students for the challenges they are going to face."

-Oluwarotimi Odeh, Roland Starn Endowed Chair and Director of Agriculture

Further, he organized a workshop for faculty and graduate students on open-source statistical package and was a keynote speaker at a symposium organized by the students' association. Odeh also facilitated the establishment of an alumni association of the university's Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and as a separate venture, joined friends to create a school that will provide high school-level education in the state capital, and also cater to students with disability. The school is scheduled to open in August 2025.

Now that he's back at Stan State, the benefit of his Fulbright opportunity continues with his current students.

"One way this experience will help my class is providing them with a better appreciation of the opportunities they have here at Stan State, and to take advantage of them to better themselves," Odeh said.

"The second way this helps is the recognition that I have a bigger responsibility to ensure that our students get a broader understanding of the agriculture industry." We know very few of them leave the Central Valley, and 96 percent of the world is outside of the U.S. The majority of crops are going out of the U.S. How do we make sure the next generation of leaders in the ag industry is conscious of the fact that the market is not only the U.S.? How do they continue to educate themselves and become aware and be sensitive to this changing demand and the opportunities in the world?

"Ag businesses will survive, because everybody has to eat. Being sensitive to emerging opportunities and then the technologies that come along with them is critical for any business to survive."

Odeh's background and appreciation for agriculture was fostered by visiting the cocoa plantation owned by his mother's family when he was a child.

"Some think of ag as a career," Odeh said. "We see it as a privilege, but along with that privilege comes responsibility. It is a huge responsibility to be able to feed the world.

"Africa's food insecurity is huge. Stan State is located in arguably the most productive area in the world. I wonder about our university's active role. Our responsibility is not only to people here but to feed the world. Acting locally, while thinking globally. That's one of the reasons I think it's very important to delve deeper into this issue of how we feed the increasing population of the world. That is what has led me on this path.

"Again, ag is not just a privilege but a responsibility. And, I think that responsibility is what our institution should feel, embrace it and serve. We have a responsibility to prepare students for the challenges they are going to face and the responsibility to feed their generation and those coming after them."

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