Trevor Horn
Farm Director at Mid-Ohio Food Collective
What is the benefit of collaboration between industry and education?
The key benefit for collaboration between industry and education is the opportunity to create experiences that connect students and teachers to the needs of the professionals, strengthening the community. Education evolves through discussing the types of attributes employers are looking for in employees. Innovation and research can build an infrastructure for local economy and develop higher -killed workers to advance an area and build a more solid foundation to grow.
*Why should teachers connect with you through GrowNextGen?
My goal is to be a support for not only teachers’ daily classroom curriculum but also help them innovate and advocate for the need to build connections with students, peers, and administrators in their districts. I have been fortunate enough to gain experience creating and developing agriculture and food science programing that resonate with students and teachers in a more urban setting. There is tremendous potential in combining science learned in agriculture in the past with science-driven future farming practices to educate the everyday consumer. The end goal is to make agriculture practices less impactful on an environment while increasing nutritional density of the foods we eat. With GrowNextGen’s mission to get more agriculture-based lessons into classrooms, lessons taught to today’s students could be the resolution to some of the world’s challenges in the future.
What value/assistance can you and your organization provide to teachers and classrooms as they connect with you?
We are planning to create evolving educational experiences at all of our three growing spaces, an educational facility with classroom space and another area with a home kitchen for lessons supporting everyday life skills for our neighbors in the area.
We will host field trips, afterschool programming, and summer programming for K-12. We plan to develop programs to support teachers implementing agriculture, food science, and life skills into their curriculum. We will be helping families learn to grow their own food using equitable and affordable techniques to provide them the ability to obtain nutritionally dense foods more efficiently. We will be supporting urban farming with workshops teaching best practices and agribusiness.
Our main farm will be the hub, highlighting sustainable growing practices both traditional precision agriculture and through future farming practices with techniques such as hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics.
We will be working closely with college students to help support their higher learning needs, providing areas for them to create projects to collect data, study ways to grow, and produce products to obtain credentials needed for degrees.
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