Established with the aid of a Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) grant, this project was created to offer insight into what sustainability within agriculture actually looks like. Spread across eastern Nebraska, ten different farming operations are featured across the twenty different videos. Each farmer was interviewed by a high school student from a nearby school about what their operation does, how and why they choose to manage it in a certain way, and what makes it sustainable as well as what would make it more sustainable.

Each video is accompanied by a short document including an overview of the operation, teaching objectives, and several questions to foster classroom discussion. Context specific modules were created encompassing the concept of sustainability as defined by social, economic, environmental factors. These additional modules pull information from across the different farmers to illustrate an overarching concept. It is our belief that creating modules exploring these three areas will increase appeal to educators outside of vocational agriculture departments. Business classes could easily incorporate the module on Niche Marketing or Biology classes the module on Soil Health.

Our belief is that the true value of this tool lies in its locality. Resources for sustainable agriculture curricula are readily accessible with a quick Internet search, but few offer the added benefit of being directly applicable to the classroom’s region. These videos bring the farmer from the field into the classroom to enhance a segment of valuable, already packed class time with ease--providing instructors with the ability to connect course concepts to a real, regional farmer. The goal is not to substitute school to farm visits, but to facilitate an easier, less time-intensive alternative to readily supplement daily course material. Discussion documents that compliment each video provide contact information for the farmers to open up the possibility for taking the process a step further and bringing the classroom out to the farm. A deeper discussion may ensue following an introductory discussion based upon the provided video segments. Further, promotion of the cross-disciplinary potential of the videos will broaden the audience of students being exposed to alternative systems of agriculture and illustrate the relatedness of agriculture to every subject.