Читать книгу North American Agroforestry - Группа авторов - Страница 24

The development of a domestic agroforestry program is especially important to the nation’s land‐grant institutions, and specifically their state land‐grant colleges of agriculture and forestry. After successfully achieving the goal of enhanced scientific rigor (USDA, 1987), these institutions are now being criticized for moving away from their original applied missions, thus becoming less directly responsive to the needs of the public (National Research Council, 1996). In spite of this trend, the development of comprehensive agroforestry programs and multiple partnerships focused on helping private rural landowners is well underway across the United States (USDA, 2015).

Land‐grant institutions are also responsible for educating future professionals. The teaching of agroforestry courses offers the opportunity to help meet the interests of students for an interdisciplinary, problem‐solving education, which is difficult to provide due to the demands for scientific rigor within discipline‐based curricula (Gold & Jose, 2012; Lassoie, 1990; Lassoie, Huxley, & Buck, 1994). More specifically, agroforestry can provide a model for teaching holistic approaches to land use management and may attract students from a wide variety of disciplines within the agricultural and natural resource sciences. Likewise, agroforestry provides an intersection between major fields of study, and reconnecting agriculture and forestry will certainly strengthen these fields as they move to develop a scientific basis for new management paradigms. In addition, new opportunities for funding and program development will arise as the importance of domestic agroforestry increases, thereby providing new areas for professional advancement by young academics.

Land‐grant institutions are emphasizing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research to deal with real‐world problems that cross disciplines. This approach also recognizes that many of the problems we face today require solutions that require an interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary approach (Stock & Burton, 2011). Agroforestry, with its roots as an applied science, provides ample opportunities for research across biophysical and social science disciplines to address applied problems.

Lastly, a domestic focus on agroforestry will further emphasize the importance of developing and maintaining a strong international component within the land‐grant university system (Globalizing Agricultural Science and Education Programs in America Task Force, 1997) as many of the examples of successful agroforestry activities come from projects in developing countries (Nair, 1989, 1993; Garrity et al., 2010; Pinho, Miller, & Alfaia, 2012). Hence, a comprehensive agroforestry program from the nation’s land‐grant institutions could recommit and recharge the intellectual energy necessary to address the needs of the peoples of the world, a much broader mission than originally identified for these institutions (National Research Council, 1996). Online offering of degrees and certificates is another avenue by which land‐grant institutions could offer much needed agroforestry training both nationally and globally. Such a program was initiated in 2013 at the University of Missouri, offering graduate degrees or certificates in agroforestry entirely online (Gold & Jose, 2012).