ENVI 25
Sustainable Agriculture in California Winter 2019

Cross-listed BIOL 25
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

This Winter Study Period course engages students with the diversity of agricultural practices in California on farms ranging from winter fruit and vegetable production, to orchards and vineyards, to livestock and dairy, to eggs along the Central Coast through hands-on experiences on a variety of farms. This is a Winter Study 2019 field course on Sustainable Agriculture in California, a field experience conducted primarily on-site for the month of January. For some participants, the WSP field course will segue from the seminar BIOL/ENVI 422–The Ecology of Sustainable Agriculture to be taught in Fall 2018 by H.W. Art. Preference for the WSP will be given to students who have previously taken BIOL 422. The WSP course will be limited to 8 students. This project is a replication of a WSP course HW Art taught in 2013 and again 2016, a travel WSP experiential course in which 7-8 students gained hands-on knowledge about agricultural systems by working on 8 farms and vineyards on the Central Coast of California. We concluded the month by participating in the Ecological Farming (EcoFarm) Conference. Sarah Gardner will be co-teaching the course with Prof. Art for pedagogical and practical reasons, including her experience in agriculture and her continuing this WSP periodically in the future. The learning-through-working experience is designed to both de-mystify and de-romanticize agriculture by having the students gain a fuller sense of the realities of producing food by working shoulder-to-shoulder with farmers and laborers. Art’s previous experience is that the investments of time, labor, thought, and sweat by engaging in actual farming practice creates a depth of understanding not possible in the classroom. In addition to assigned texts, we also will be reading books individually and take turns reporting back to the group in the evenings, a bit like story-telling in the oral tradition. The final product will be a collaborative journal written by the class.
The Class: Format: travel
Limit: 8
Grading: pass/fail only
Requirements/Evaluation: 10-page paper; synthetic journal of field experiences to be produced by the group
Prerequisites: none, but see preferences for over-enrollment; not open to first-year students
Enrollment Preferences: preference to senior Biology and Environmental Studies majors/concentrators who have taken The Ecology of Sustainable Agriculture and/or other food and agriculture courses; then by essay
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
BIOL 25 ENVI 25
Attributes: EXPE Experiential Education Courses
TRVL Winter Study Travel Course

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