A Curriculum for Enhancing Farmer Microbial Literacy

Short Description:
The primary purpose of this course is to render the invisible world of microbes visible to farmers. This course provides scientific-based instruction exploring how microbes can assist agriculture. Although the course is designed for farmers, this material can also help extension agents, curious citizen scientists, and other non-experts interested in enhancing their microbial literacy.

Long Description:
The invisibility, complexity, and general opaqueness of soil microbial life makes learning about the “black box of soil” difficult. To address this challenge, my project-based biology senior thesis endeavors to develop a biology-based curriculum for farmers to increase microbial literacy. A transition to a microbially centric agriculture necessitates the development of a new knowledge infrastructure. My senior thesis project aspires to contribute to this new, necessary, and expanding infrastructure. It is critical that farmers recognize their unique role as stewards of not only plants and animals but also as shepherds of an unfathomably complex, necessary, and wondrous herd of microbes.

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The LLOOF Learning Guide - A free downloadable learning guide about organic food production, entrepreneurship, volunteering and cultural exchange on farm enterprises. Plus a video channel and a community offering real life learning experience through the WWOOF network.

Published by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, the 600-page manual covers practical aspects of organic farming and gardening, applied soil science, and social and environmental issues in agriculture. Units contain lecture outlines for instructors and detailed lecture outlines for students, field and laboratory demonstrations, assessment questions, and annotated resource lists. Although much of the material has been developed for field or garden demonstrations and skill building, most of the units can also be tailored to a classroom setting.The training manual is designed for a wide audience of those involved in teaching farming and gardening, including colleges and universities with programs in sustainable agriculture, student farms or gardens, and on-farm education programs; urban agriculture, community garden, and farm training programs; farms with internships or apprenticeships; agriculture extension stations; school gardening programs; organizations such as the Peace Corps, US AID, and other groups that provide international training in food growing and ecological growing methods; and master gardener programs.