The results from a business assessment using the business management tool www.farmlife.at point the way towards location-appropriate, sustainable agriculture in Austria and offer society a clear signal for environmentally friendly food consumption.
The aim of the project “Integration of the eco-efficiency tool FarmLife into Austria’s agricultural education landscape” (FarmEdu) was therefore to implement the FarmLife tool and the didactic concept developed for it in the Austrian agricultural education system. An educational concept was already in place from the direct preliminary project FarmLife II. The aim was now to produce a FarmLife educational box with teaching and information material, literature and appropriate relaxing activities, which would offer teachers not only digital but also physical support in lessons with FarmLife. The existing educational documents were further supplemented and improved in the form of suggestions for instructive and competency-oriented teaching activities and through a special FarmLife Tactics , designed by the FarmEdu core team and also implemented HBLFA .
In addition, work was carried out to acquire interested people from the agricultural education sector at various events and through various media. In order to train the teachers accordingly, a two-day train the trainer seminar was designed, which has been offered twice a year since spring 2019 and also spontaneously if necessary. Adapted to current requirements, a seminar was held as a webinar at short notice in spring 2020. In this way, interested parties who are further away can also be reached. One FarmLife educational box each - a wooden box containing the self-designed board game including game materials as well as a USB stick with the mentioned documents, game instructions, FarmLife video, etc. - was now made available to FarmLife-trained teachers or their schools at the end of the project.
In addition to schoolchildren, the target group of the project were students from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences and the University of Agricultural and Environmental Education, who were introduced to the FarmLife tool in various courses as part of the project partnership and, among other things, were given the opportunity to write scientific theses with FarmLife. A bachelor's thesis was created that deals with an (initially only narrative) evaluation of the FarmLife-related educational offerings. Further bachelor's and master's theses are to be expected.
The results of the project activity are - as a teaching aid "to be grasped" - the interdisciplinary FarmLife education box and a solid training offer based on the project core team of the eco-efficiency research group at the HBLFA Raumberg-Gumpenstein as well as the hopefully sustainable implementation of the FarmLife education concept in the federal states of Carinthia and Lower Austria , Salzburg, Styria and Tyrol with an extensive network of teachers who have attended a FarmLife seminar. In total, the FarmLife tool is expected to reach several thousand schoolchildren and students and thus also those in agricultural practice.
The results of this project form a stable basis for further didactic development, the further expansion and securing of knowledge transfer as well as the future establishment of “location-appropriate agriculture” in Austria.
