Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture Launches ‘One-stop Shop’ for STEM Educators: The Food and Agriculture Center for Science Education

Apr 11, 2022

The American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture has launched a first-of-its-kind online platform for K-12 and STEM educators who seek to bring science to life through the lens of agriculture.

The Food and Agriculture Center for Science Education supports educators who teach, coach or advise K-12 science coursework in public and private, formal and informal educational spaces through a three-pronged approach consisting of classroom resources, professional development and partnerships.

“We’re pleased the Food and Agriculture Center for Science Education will enable us to continue supporting educators in meaningful ways with relevant resources and vital professional development,” said Daniel Meloy, executive director of the Foundation for Agriculture. “There’s such an incredible connection between science and agriculture and food production, and students everywhere can become inspired by making that connection.”

The structure of the Center provides science educators with a unique, immersive mix of valuable resources and professional development to seamlessly and fully integrate agriculture into classrooms at all levels of student development. The high-quality resources and professional development opportunities focus on core science disciplines while contextualizing the multitude of science principles found in agriculture.

Examples of forthcoming content in the three areas include:

Classroom Resources: Full units of instruction, curriculum, individual lessons and worksheets, references and more. This area focuses on creating and curating engaging, relevant, reliable and accurate resources that will equip science teachers to easily incorporate agriculture into the content they already teach to meet the Next Generation Science Standards. All materials will be open-source.
Professional Development: Immersive, experiential, supportive and accessible opportunities focused on developing, empowering and equipping educators not only from a teaching perspective, but especially through knowledge of the agricultural industry and methods of instructing that lend themselves to teaching science through the lens of agriculture.
Partnerships: A pathway for strategically aligning partners such as industry experts, trade organizations, land grant university researchers and educators to best support both the immediate and long-term needs of science educators.

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Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.