FUNDED PROJECT RESULTS

New farmer training tool has Southern origins,
national scope

Fundamentals of Organic Farming and Gardening: An Instructor’s Guide

Coordinator: Alice Rolls, Georgia Organics, Atlanta, GA
Stakeholder locations: Georgia, The South, the U.S.
Project period: 2008-2009

In 2006, Georgia Organics developed an organic farming curriculum guide that was extremely popular—almost 1,000 copies were distributed to instructors across the nation within a year. The curriculum was also added to the Georgia Department of Education’s Agricultural Education Curriculum CD, distributed annually to all high school agriculture and science educators in the state.

In 2009, with funding from OFRF, a revised edition was completed with a focus on repositioning the curriculum to sharpen its emphasis on adult instruction while retaining usability for high school instructors. Divided into eight units from “Soil” to “Practical Applications,” each unit includes a lesson text and plans, teacher demonstrations, student activities, PowerPoint presentations and videos. The revisions allow a user to utilize the entire curriculum or extract relevant components for pointed use.

The guide is available for free on the web at Georgia Organics, or copies of the curriculum are available on CD-ROM for $10.

Classes using the revised curriculum materials were held in winter ’08 through spring ‘09 to groups of gardeners and prospective farmers. Evaluations were done by all of these groups and this feedback informed the revisions that were made in the curriculum.

One student commented:

Having completed the master gardener training and attempted organic gardening for years, I wasn’t sure I would learn a lot, but I did. I now know how to make use of the information I had gathered in my head.
—Student, spring ‘09

A final report (8 pages) describing the process of creating the curriculum guide was submitted in June 2009.