New Resources: Sustainable Agriculture

Posted by on July 8, 2005

[posted from Community Food Security Coalition listserv]

We are please to announce the completion of the new CASFS Sustainable Agriculture Instructional Resources Web-page.

Growing interest in sustainable agriculture has generated a wealth of educational materials on the many social, environmental, and agronomic topics related to this expanding field.

We’ve reviewed hundreds of resources?textbooks, popular books, web sites, videos, PowerPoint presentations, and more?to identify the highest-quality and most relevant materials on sustainable agriculture available. Whether you’re teaching a 2-hour community gardening workshop on irrigation or a semester-long college course on the social and environmental impacts of agriculture, this resource will help you locate the best materials to meet your instructional needs.

We’ve also developed a catalogue description and outline for a comprehensive course on sustainable agriculture, appropriate for the community college, state college, or university level (see Course Description and Course Outline under How to Use This Resource, below). The Course Outline includes topics in social and environmental sciences; plant, soil, crop, and animal sciences; pest management; natural resource management; the adoption of sustainable agriculture; and the growth and development of sustainable agriculture and the organic food industry.

Topic headings in the Course Outline can be taught as stand-alone units, combined to create a more extensive course, or used to supplement an existing course. Each topic heading links to an annotated list of materials for instructors to use as resources for a class, seminar, lab, or workshop. These annotated lists draw in part from the resource sections of CASFS’s two instructional manuals:

Teaching Organic Farming and Gardening: Resources for Instructors
Teaching Direct Marketing and Small Farm Viability: Resources for Instructors

By providing this online material we hope to enhance the efforts of those now teaching sustainable agriculture topics and encourage instructors to develop new courses in this emerging field.

Please visit the CASFS website: http://zzyx.ucsc.edu/casfs/index.html (see “Instructional Resources”) for more information.