New bill seeks improvement in Nebraska agricultural

Nebraska State Sen. Kate Sullivan has a new approach to finding out how much students know about agriculture.

Sullivan recently introduced LB 884, a bill that would create a nine-person Agricultural Literacy task force to discover whether agriculture plays an adequate role in school curricula in Nebraska.

"Agriculture is much too important to only be taught to a small number of students who may already be considering agricultural careers," Sullivan said in a Feb. 1, Nebraska Unicameral update.

This program would not be targeted at providing funding for new or current programs, said Jessica Kolterman, director of the Nebraska Farm Bureau Political Action Committee and state government relations.

"The main intention of the taskforce is to look at state curriculum and figure out how agriculture is being taught in schools," Kolterman said. "And then figure out how we could incorporate it better."

This would be a great idea, said Tacy Langemeier, a senior animal science major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

"Kids have no idea that people's livelihoods depend on the decisions their parents make in the grocery store," she said.

According to Kolterman, when and if new curriculum is implemented, it will focus on integrating agriculture into existing teaching methods.

"For example, if you were teaching elementary math," Kolterman said. "If a hen lays this many eggs per day, how long does it take her to lay three dozen eggs?"

This bill is not without its critics though. Brian Halstead, who represented the Nebraska Department of Education at the Jan. 31 hearing, said the department was already working on some of the same goals. He asked: Why create another taskforce to look at what was already being done?

"Basically the Department of Education was unhappy with us because we didn't go to them first and work with their process," Kolterman said. "We didn't realize that there was a process, but now we do, so we will be working with them."

Some programs are already in place to help teachers integrate agriculture into the curriculum, like one being spearheaded by Tiffany Heng-Moss, Kolterman said.

Heng-Moss, a professor of entomology at UNL, and Jon Pedersen, director of Science Education and associate dean of the College of Education and Human Sciences, will teach the course at UNL.

The program aims to show teachers how to use soybeans to teach science classes and concepts such as plant life cycles, Kolterman said.

Kolterman went on to say that other programs are also being considered incorporating agriculture into college classes.

"Every age group needs it (agricultural education)," Langemeier said. "From elementary school to high school to college and even past that."

ashleyburns@dailynebraskan.com