Kids bottling barbecue sauce, an interactive Web site on farmyard physics, a curriculum covering biomass and business plans -- this is NOT your father's ag ed.

By E. M. Morrison

Once limited to vocational training for farm youth, agricultural education is fast moving beyond crop and livestock production techniques. The new ag education is aimed at all students -- urban and rural. It extends to every segment of the food industry and every area of the school curriculum. And it has a new goal: universal agricultural literacy.

AURI is part of this push to expand and redefine agricultural education in Minnesota. In the last two years, AURI has helped create several innovative programs to teach the value-added side of agriculture.

High school entrepreneurship projects in southwest Minnesota and St. Paul provide hands-on experience running real food processing companies (see front page story). And AURI is sponsoring new high school curriculum called "Dollars and Sense." Designed at the University of Minnesota, the year-long course lets students develop and market new ag products.

Disconnected from agriculture
Even if ag education now has a wider scope, it's still something that takes place down the hall in the vo-ag room. "In the K-12 program, agriculture is largely absent from the regular curriculum," says Richard Nelson, chair of the U of M-Crookston agriculture divsion and a former AURI director.

Even in rural areas, few people have direct links to farming. Less than two percent of the U.S. population is engaged in agricultural production; in Minnesota, where agriculture is a cornerstone of the economy, producers make up a scant five percent of the population.

The result: "We have an enormous population that has no concept of modern agriculture and little knowledge of the food and fiber system in this country," says Shelley Diment, U of M liason to the Minnesota Argicultural Education in Leadership Council, a public policy group led by Minnesota Senator Dallas Sams, an AURI board member, and Representative Steve Wenzel.

Disconnected from agriculture, most people are unaware of the wide range of opportunities in the industry, Diment says. Teachers and other ag professionals are in short supply, and agricultural public policy suffers when citizens are uninformed, she says.

New classroom approaches
One solution is to weave agriculture into the school curriculum, Nelson says. "You can use agriculture to teach a range of subjects -- biology, chemistry, physics, economics, ecology, business, math, social studies." When the lesson calls for a real-life application, Nelson suggests, "Why not make it an agricultural application?"

Strong support for this approach is building, says Al Withers, director of Minnesota Ag in the Classroom and publisher of AgMag, a magazine for middle school students and teachers. Withers fields about 300 requests a month from educators for agricultural materials.

"Teachers are looking for ways to make connections between disciplines and to teach what is relevant to their students' lives. Agriculture is a vehicle for that." What's needed now, Withers says, are "teacher-friendly" materials that bring agriculture into the daily classroom.

Materials coming up
Ag in the Classroom is responding with K-12 learning packages tied to the new Minnesota graduation standards.

Nelson is designing similar materials for the Internet: "What we have in mind are instructional modules, all set up and ready to go. Teachers can pull them off the Web as independent learning activities or enhancements to existing lesson plans."

AURI is contributing to the effort too, says David Bartholomay, AURI deputy director. "The projects in Westbrook-Walnut Grove and St. Paul are models -- blueprints that show how ag entrepreneurship can work in both urban and rural schools."

But it will take a long-term commitment by the whole agricultural community to achieve ag literacy, Diment stresses. "We have a generation of work to reach our goal."