The FarmLife education box is an innovative, interdisciplinary teaching concept - not just for agricultural schools!

General

Agriculture should protect the climate and the environment as much as possible. At the same time, farmers must always adapt their farm management to the current climate situation. It requires a lot of specialist knowledge and sensitivity to be successful.

In recent years, FarmLife has established itself as a practical farm management tool for assessing the sustainability of agricultural operations on an individual farm basis. This not only provides an analysis and evaluation, but FarmLife also offers a strengths-weaknesses analysis and recommendations for action that build on this.

This not only promotes the operational skills of the company managers, but also strengthens the raising of awareness both within the company itself and externally - i.e. towards retailers and consumers. The future-determining multiplier in this regard is the young generation of potential farmers.

Main topics in lessons

Understanding natural connections and interactions that result from human actions must be an important part of agricultural education.

Interdisciplinary focuses on the following topics are ideal:

• ecology
• climate
• Environment and resource management
• biodiversity
• Sustainability assessment

The FarmLife educational box and its basis WWW.FARMLIFE.AT

The FarmLife educational box offers a comprehensive and versatile package of teaching material on the topic of environment and resource management, assessment of sustainability in agriculture and individual areas of the online tool, as well as work suggestions to lighten up lessons. Many of Austria's agriculturally oriented schools have already received the FarmLife educational box - in the form of a wooden box with a USB storage device and the FarmLife Tactics game - and can use it to enrich lessons in a wide variety of curriculum subjects.

The business management tool itself serves as the basis for this educational concept. This has been adapted to make it easy to use in lessons and is freely available to schools. The information button on the FarmLife home page directs you to all the tools and materials for teaching with FarmLife and also offers several short instructional videos. The flexibly applicable documents enable independent use in different subjects of the curriculum and/or in interdisciplinary projects. A wide range of teaching methods and approaches are supported.

The pool of FarmLife teaching materials, which is currently available on the learning platform of the University of Agricultural and Environmental Education (only with login), will soon be available on raumberg-gumpenstein.at.

 Who benefits from FarmLife:

Didactic evaluation of the FarmLife educational concept

In the DaFNE project “Didactic evaluation and dissemination of the FarmLife educational concept”, the FarmLife educational box was subjected to a didactic evaluation in order to check whether it has the essential properties that competency-oriented educational documents and tools intended for teaching must have, and that they have these can also be used across disciplines. The existence of these basic requirements could be confirmed. Please see the full final project report for all details about the evaluation that took place in autumn 2023.

The underlying projects were financed as part of the departmental research program via dafne.at with funds from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Regions and Water Management. The BML supports applied, problem-oriented and practical research in the department's area of ​​expertise.