Beginning farmer training and program development in United States is one of the most significant yet poorly understood areas of agriculture, food system, and community development research and practice. This article offers a review of the social context informing recent beginning farmer educational programming in order to shed light on its development, purpose, and future trajectory. We provide several illustrations of best practices to support our main point that adult agricultural education for beginning farmers is taking on new forms and patterns to support and sustain a new generation of famers. As such it is vitalizing new opportunities to generate and exchange information and knowledge for sustainable agriculture. While these examples appear promising, the article concludes with recommendations for researchers and practitioners to expand the boundaries of what constitutes meaningful education for beginning a 282 Litton Reaves, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061 USA; niewolny@vt.edu; +1 (540)
Universities and colleges across the United States are making innovative strides in higher education programming to catalyze a more sustainable era of agriculture. This is clearly exemplified through the formation of community-university partnerships as critical illustrations of civic engagement (CE) for sustainable agriculture (SA) education. This paper explores the praxis of CE for SA education by focusing on the ways in which five land-grant universities (LGUs) with undergraduate programs in SA have developed and put into practice community-university partnerships. Drawing upon these programs and supportive literature, this article specifically attempts to describe the role and significance of CE for SA education, emerging community-university partnership models and their implications for prompting food and agriculture sustainability, and student learning and program assessment outcomes. We also reveal the many challenges and opportunities encountered by stakeholders involved in the creation and continua, *
Though community gardens (CGs) have emerged as a potential strategy to improve access to and consumption of fruit and vegetables, few published studies inform program planning, implementation, or maintenance of CG initiatives. Grounded in the community-based participatory research approach and guided by the RE-AIM (reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, and maintenance) framework, this qualitative case study explored perceptions of CG among 6 CG leaders and 21 CG participants in the health disparate Dan River region. Findings highlight key opportunities to promote the successful reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, and maintenance of CGs in similar vulnerable communities.
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