Training Manuals and Professional Development Activities for Teaching Organic Farming and Marketing

Training Manuals and Professional Development Activities for Teaching Organic Farming and Marketing

Summary

We are incredibly grateful for the support from WSARE for the project entitled “Training Manuals and Professional Development Activities for Teaching Organic Farming and Marketing” at the UCSC Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS). This annual report covers the progress on the project from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2015.

In 2012 CASFS initiated a major effort to update and expand its two instructional manuals that were developed ten years ago and are now used worldwide. The two curricula, Teaching Organic Farming and Gardening: Resources for Instructors (TOFG) and Teaching Direct Marketing and Small Farm Viability: Resources for Instructors (TDM) were completed in early 2015.

We have successfully completed the publication of the two revised and expanded instructional manuals and have made them available as free resources online (and at cost in print). To raise awareness about the manuals and to train agriculture educators in the use of the manuals we have broadly advertised the manuals and have presented webinars, conference workshops, and trainings in 2015. We will continue with webinars, conference presentations, and trainings in the last six months of the project.

The goal of this project has been to revise, update, and expand CASFS teaching resources for organic farming and gardening, and to make these resources broadly accessible as free online teaching tools. The project was much more comprehensive and ambitious than originally conceived, with every unit revised, new units developed, narrative supplements written, appendices added, resource sections expanded, and PowerPoint presentations created for many units. For this reason it took longer to reach publication than anticipated, but both manuals were completed in the first half of 2015.

To expand the reach of these new manuals, we devoted considerable planning and resources to dissemination, outreach, and training. The goal for dissemination and downloading of the manuals is nationwide, with the focus of the initial outreach on western states. To complete the dissemination, outreach, and training phase of the project as comprehensively as planned, we requested a No Cost Time Extension to June 30, 2016.

Objectives/Performance Targets

This project will result in online and print teaching resources for sustainable agriculture education and on-farm training for a wide range of audiences. The objectives and performance targets for this project assumed the completion of the revision and production of manuals in 2014. The manuals were not completed on the schedule outlined in the original proposal timeline due to the sheer enormity of the task of revising, updating, and expanding more than 1000 pages of instructional materials with 27 contributing writers and 26 reviewers. The Objectives/Performance Targets included in the proposal and in our Project Overview remain in place for our work in 2013 through 2016. Our NCTE allows our work to continue on this project to June 30, 2016 to complete the performance targets outlined below:

• Reach over 1,000 educators with mailed and online information about the manuals in 2015 and attract another 1,000 to view the manuals from links on other websites serving educators and producers by the June 30, 2016.
• Disseminate the new manuals online and in print to over 2000 users by June 2016
• Train 300 extension personnel and other educators in the three-state region through five train-the-trainer sessions, five conference presentations, and two webinars by the end of June 2016.
• Build in evaluation of the project by tracking downloads of the materials from the UC eScholarship and CASFS websites, surveying those using the manuals, and collecting workshop evaluations.

Accomplishments/Milestones

In 2015 we successfully completed the publication of the two revised and expanded instructional manuals, totaling over 1700 pages of resources for farmer educators. An overview of the new and revised units and materials in each book is included in the attached document “CASFS Training Manuals Revision Overview.”

The revision and writing work was led by CASFS Principal Editor Martha Brown and CASFS Research Specialist Jan Perez in consultation with other CASFS staff. For each book Brown and Perez made a revision plan clarifying roles and assigning unit revisions to over 22 contributing writers and CASFS instructional staff. The project team received feedback on the curriculum from 26 reviewers, Apprenticeship staff and instructors, current students, and previous users of the curriculum manuals (through interviews). New and revised material was field-tested with the apprentices in the six-month CASFS Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture course.

The organic production manual, Teaching Organic Farming & Gardening: Resources for Instructors (TOFG had 37 detailed class lectures revised, reviewed, edited, and formatted. Twenty-one new narrative supplements and 27 new and updated appendices were added. Nine Powerpoint presentations to accompany the units in Part 1, Organic Farming & Gardening Skills, were completed or are in development. Finally, 12 instructional videos, to supplement lectures and demonstrations, have been completed. The table of contents for the print books are attached and the links below provide the full contents available online for each instructional resource.

These publications were made available for free online at cost in print in early 2015. The books are organized in teaching units, with the online versions linking to PowerPoint presentations and some instructional videos. The print version comes in a three-ring binder so that instructors can pull out just one unit as needed (e.g. the propagation unit to take to the greenhouse for a class and demonstration). The online versions make it easy to download one unit at a time as needed. The sites for these online versions are:

For Teaching Organic Farming and Gardening: Resources for Instructors (TOFG) http://casfs.ucsc.edu/about/publications/Teaching-Organic-Farming/index.html)

For Teaching Direct Marketing and Small Farm Viability: Resources for Instructors (TDM) http://casfs.ucsc.edu/about/publications/Teaching-Direct-Marketing/index.html)

To raise awareness about the manuals and to train agriculture educators in the use of the manuals we have broadly advertised the manuals and have presented webinars, conference workshops, and trainings in 2015. We track the online usage through Google analytics and have the following data to show for 2015:

TOFG downloads and views since March 2015
Part 1: 4,874
Part 2: 866
Part 3: 681
Index page: 2,405 views

TDM downloads and views since May 2015
Parts 1-9: 1,273
TDM Index page: 1,164

Additionally over 200 print manuals have been sold or given away as review copies since the TOFG was published in March 2015 and the TDM in May 2015 (54 review copies distributed). To date we have have conducted email and mail outreach to educators with information about the manuals in 2015 and have linked the manuals to other websites such as eOrganic.org, SARE, and other sites serving educators and producers. A sample press release from March 2015 is provided here: http://news.ucsc.edu/2015/03/casfs-training-manual.html

Presentations, webinars, and conference workshops to date have included three conference presentations and three presentations to farmer educator organizations in five western states. Three more conference presentations and two small group trainings are planned for 2016 so far.

In May 2015 we presented a webinar on the use of the manuals to 100 webinar participants (we had limited attendance to 100 and filled to capacity). This highly successful webinar reached participants across the U.S. and is available online here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fqpbmnu5xg5b146/2015-05 19%2011.29%20Teaching%20Organic%20Farming%20and%20Gardening%20.mp4?dl=0. We have another webinar planned for February 24, 2016.

• TDM Table of Contents
• Teaching Organic Farming Table of Contents
• Training Manuals Revision and Expansion Overview

Impacts and Contributions/Outcomes

With the distribution of the new training manuals online and in print, educators nationwide have access to these greatly improved and expanded instructional materials, especially as free online resources. The main thrust of our targeted outreach has been and will be to agriculture educators in California, Oregon and Washington, but we have and will also reach educators in Nevada, Alaska, and Hawaii. In our final report we will give a more thorough analysis of downloads and views of the various parts of the instructional manuals as is made available through eScholarship Repository. We will also provide a detailed listing all of the outreach and presentations about the manual in our final report.

Our evaluations specialist is also working on developing a survey to send to training manual users in early 2016, approximately one year after the publication of Teaching Organic Farming and Gardening. In our final report we will include the results from this survey along with an overall analysis of the training manuals’ dissemination and our outreach to agricultural educators.

Collaborators: