I’ve spent some time exploring requirements for undergraduate and master’s degree programs at schools with agricultural science, with the intention of scoping out my studies. Looking at the requirements from Cornell, Michigan State University, Oregon State University, and UMass Amherst I have winnowed out a set of subtopics to explore more deeply:
- Soil science (including ecology, nutrient management, and mapping)
- Pest management (including entomology, plant diseases, weed biology, and toxicology of pesticides/herbicides)
- Field crops (including plant genetics, farm machinery, and seed science)
- International agriculture (including historic and modern agricultural practices outside the U.S.)
This is by no means an exhaustive list, and skews towards the underlying science. For becoming an effective political advocate, I’ll also need to understand the economic and policy issues in agriculture, both domestic and international. However, it’s a start. And it’s better to start imperfectly than to never start at all!
I began my soil science search with the hope of finding complete sets of course materials online, but it seems that most professors (quite reasonably) post materials on access-restricted university-supported systems like moodle and blackboard. I have been able to read a number of syllabi, however, and plan to use these to structure my study. The book “The Nature and Properties of Soils” by Brady and Weil shows up in a lot of syllabi, and is inexpensive and well-reviewed on amazon, so I will use this book at the center of my soil science studies. One of the authors, Ray Weil, has a syllabus on his website for his 15-week course based on this book. I plan to follow that progression of readings and topics, supplementing it with materials suggested in a soils.org Fundamentals of Soil Science syllabus and testing my information retention with the textbook publisher’s supplemental website. I haven’t yet decided what other methods of information engagement and testing I will try yet– it may well take the form of essays-as-blog-posts, so go ahead and look forward to that, hypothetical reader!