ABSTRACT
Urban food action plans seek quantitative data on household agriculture gardening, traditionally difficult to quantify rapidly, as welt as data on inequality to explore the potential to improve equitable access to fresh vegetables through household agriculture. This article presents a novel hybrid field survey (HFS) method, combining ground surveys with satellite imagery to quantify the prevalence and area of household agriculture gardens, as well as inequality by neighborhood income. We test the method in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, (Twin Cities), USA, analyzing the presence/absence (prevalence) and size of agriculture gardens across a total of similar to 17,500 households in 2017 and repeated in 2020 (during COVID-19). In 2017, the overall mean frequency of household agricultural gardening was 5.0%, with significant differences (2.7 vs. 7.0%) across low- vs. high-income neighborhoods. The city-wide median area per agriculture garden size was 14.6 m(2) with greater size (19.8 vs. 11.6 m(2)) in low- vs. high-income neighborhoods, respectively. Across all income groups, the gardening area was a small fraction of the yard area, suggesting little land availability constraints. Measurements in the summer of 2020 during COVID-19 found the method sensitive over time, showing an overall 60% increase in the prevalence of household agriculture with low-income neighborhoods increasing rates from 3 to 5%. Overall, the method can inform aggregate production potential and inequality in household agriculture.
ABSTRACT
As with many aspects of teaching, the COVID-19 pandemic forced soil judging teams to attempt new strategies towards achieving student learning outcomes. Soil judging Regions IV and V hosted remote regional contests in October 2020 in place of traditional, in-person contests typically held each fall. We conducted pre- and post-contest surveys to assess student learning outcomes, attitudes, and reflections on the remote contest experience compared to past, in-person contest experiences. We received 108 total responses from students who participated in the Region IV and Region V remote soil judging contests (>80% response rate). In self-reported learning outcomes, there were no significant gains post-contest and there were minimal differences between students in Regions IV and V. Female students, students with more soil judging experience, and students who had taken more soil science courses agreed more strongly that soil science is important, that they planned to pursue careers in soil science, and that they gained important skills from soil judging. Finally, students who previously participated in contests reported that they gained more knowledge and enjoyed in-person contests more than the remote contests held in Fall 2020. Thus, while it is possible to replicate some aspects of the soil judging experience in a remote contest, other aspects that are critical to student engagement are lost when teams are unable to gather at the contest location and examine soils in the field. © 2021 The Authors. Natural Sciences Education published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society of Agronomy