Especially within the light of the current loss of biodiversity, we want our students to gain a better understanding of the issues at stake in order to take action and support plants and their pollinators. Many educational approaches focus on honeybees, disregarding the vast diversity in the context of pollination systems and the complex…

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed education. In these circumstances, technology aided learning by providing new ways of teaching and communicating with students. In this work, we report the online activities carried out in the Basic Organic Chemistry virtual course of the Chemistry Department at UNS (Argentina) for first-year students of the…

In 2019, Artist Inc. and the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project presented "Snow White and the Apple's Revenge" at the Likhandula Festival in Los Baños, the Philippines. Adapting the original Grimm version of the fairytale to challenge the validity of GM crops, it was presented in the town where the International Rice Research Institute…

International Extension experiences can provide valuable outcomes to clientele. Careful planning is necessary to maximize the benefits to participants and the potential impacts of the tour. International agricultural sciences students can benefit from participating in these tours and greatly add to their success. In this article, we describe the…

Allison B. Wallace describes a seminar in organic horticulture she created and teaches as part of an honors curriculum. She answers the question of how gardening is appropriate for high-ability college students by saying that she believes efforts to raise plants by relatively non violent means teaches and disciplines students in an ethical way to…

Hypoxic and anoxic stresses on mesophytes cause a waste of plant productivity. Many phenotypic responses of roots to hypoxia have long been known, and now genotypic and biochemical responses are being elucidated. Hypoxia causes activation of dozens of specific genes that help the plant to survive hypoxia. It is now clear that mesophytes actively…

Arbuscular mycorrhizae fungi (AMF) play a large role in the current understanding of the soil ecosystem. They increase nutrient and water uptake, improve soil structure, and form complex hyphal networks that transfer nutrients between plants within an ecosystem. Factors such as species present, the physiological balance between the plants in the…

Universities develop strategic planning documents, and as part of that planning process, logic models are developed for specific programs within the university. This article examines the long-standing pecan program at New Mexico State University and the deficiencies and successes in the evolution of its logic model. The university's agricultural…

Fostering the cognitive skills to analyse environmental "commons dilemmas" is an urgent task of environmental education globally. Commons dilemmas are characterised by structural incentives to overexploit a natural resource; their solution is particularly pressing in threatened biodiversity "hotspot" areas. Solutions to these…

Understanding plant breeding as well as procedures and issues of seed companies are skills students studying agronomy need to acquire. Simulation games can be effective teaching tools in developing higher-order thinking skills of students. The "Fantasy Seed Company" game was developed to create motivated learners by allowing students to run a mock…

Copper fungicides and bactericides are often used in tomato cultivation and can cause toxic Cu levels in soils. In order to combat this, organic matter can be applied to induce chelation reactions and form a soluble complex by which much of the Cu can leach out of the soil profile or be taken up safely by plants. Organic acids such as citric,…

It is difficult to demonstrate the soil water retention relationship and related concepts because the specialized equipment required for performing these measurements is unavailable in most classrooms. This article outlines a low-cost, easily visualized method by which these concepts can be demonstrated in most any classroom. Columns (62.5 cm…

The decline of enrollments in agronomy programs across the United States has been a concern for more than a decade. In an effort to reverse this trend, the Agronomy Department at Iowa State University (ISU) launched the "I'm An Agronomist" marketing campaign in 2006. This article reports on these efforts and the change in the…

Two land-grant institutions, Michigan State University (MSU) and Texas A&M University (TAMU) used funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to partner with the National University of Rwanda (NUR) to support the agriculture faculty in Rwanda following the 1994 genocide. In addition, the three institutions…

Soil quality, soil health, and soil sustainability are concepts that are being widely used but are difficult to define and illustrate, especially to a non-technical audience. The objectives of this manuscript were to develop simple and inexpensive methodologies to both qualitatively and quantitatively estimate water infiltration rates (IR),…