Curriculum
Explore, download and share these proven real-world educational resources to help bring science and agriculture to life in your classroom. Relevant and engaging, you’ll find useful, easy-to-implement lesson plans and activities.
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Engineering solutions in agriculture
How does modern agriculture use engineering to address soil compaction? Looking for an activity that combines robotics, coding, and engineering with a real life problem? This unit uses MakeBlock parts, Scratch programming, and modeling to help students design a solution …
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Smart farming: using data to make decisions
What kind of data do farmers use to make decisions? Where does that data come from? Become a "farmer" on a journey from pre-planting to harvest to see what decisions farmers are making every year as they farm. Growers across the country are gaining access to more and more data about …
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Healthy soils
What makes soil healthy? What methods might farmers use to maintain healthy soil? “Soil” doesn’t just mean “dirt.” It is a mixture of minerals like rocks and clay, organic material like dead leaves, living organisms like worms, microbes, and insects, and even air and water. There …
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Stick a fork in it: biodegradable products
Which biobased substrate will create a durable form of bio-plastic? Which biobased material has the least effect on the composition of compost and runoff through degradation? Compostable plastics are a new generation of plastics that are biodegradable through composting. They are derived generally from renewable raw materials like starch (e.g. corn, potato, tapioca etc), …
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Dinner and data and drones, oh my!: technology in agriculture
What technologies are used to help farmers become more productive and more sustainable? Drones (or UAVs-unmanned aerial vehicles) are taking to the skies. What are they doing up there? What other technologies are there that help growers become more productive, yet more thoughtful about …
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AFNR natural resources
How do we impact natural resources by our activities? This unit helps meet some of the AFNR curriculum standards for natural resources. Students will learn how to test texture and other physical characteristics of soil, conduct water quality tests, …
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Nitrogen fixation and legumes: say what?
How do legumes fix nitrogen? If the atmosphere is about 80% Nitrogen (N2), but plants cannot use that form, how do they get nitrogen? In this unit, students plant and care for soybeans under one of five different …
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Oh soy good! Milk types and food security
How might soymilk, and other types of milk, help ensure food security? Investigate various milk sources and their composition through core disciplines of Science, Math, Social Studies and Language Arts to discover the availability of milk types within multiple cultures …
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Managing nutrient and pesticide needs in agriculture
Why do farmers spend time and money to apply chemicals to their fields? In this threaded PBL*, (an effort to integrate agricultural understandings into the normal sequence of an Environmental Science classroom) students will conduct several “close reads” (reading for …
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Where does our food come from, anyway? Sustainable ag systems
How do growers’ decisions affect the sustainability of agricultural systems? Understand and appreciate food producers through this case study and determine what decisions must be made on a yearly, monthly, or daily basis to maintain an environmental system that will continue …
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Biochar: producing bioenergy from waste
How can a waste stream become part of a cyclical system? Make biochar, a soil amendment, by making and using a model top light updraft (TLUD) pyrolysis kiln or oven.
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Growing more food: biotechnology
How will we feed 9 billion people? Grow soybeans using Round-Up Ready seeds to illustrate how biotechnology can be used as a tool to increase production. Introduce students to different options for growing soybeans, investigate …