FARMily Ties: Collaborating with a Community to Teach Ag Policy.

Collaboration ranks among the most significant buzzwords in US higher education. Faculty are encouraged to create courses delivered in team-teaching formats. Universities tout their collaborations with neighborhoods, non-profit organizations, and businesses in delivering powerful learning experiences. This paper documents the way in which one partnership among the authors (who are siblings) and a small agricultural community in North Central Iowa produced an ag policy course during a Furman University May term. Agricultural policy is not exempt from the polarization of contemporary American politics. By marshaling a broad array of community resources, the authors exposed students to many viewpoints on agricultural policy. The high level of trust among the siblings and the community provided students with unparalleled access to numerous farms and ag-related organizations. As a result, students were provided with a rich, finely textured portrait of ag policy, rather than the more typical one-sided view. The paper discusses the logistical and administrative challenges (from transportation and housing to food preparation and inclement weather) involved with this unusual type of collaboration. While creating this kind of partnership is labor intensive, it has enormous payoffs for students both in learning the impact of a complex array of policies on those being regulated and in seeing why individuals and organizations may take very different positions. The benefits do not solely accrue to the students. This kind of collaboration also has had the impact of recharging a professional career and spawning a more multi-faceted dialogue on ag policy among community partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]