A Review of Agricultural Academic Safety, Health, and Biosecurity Curriculum Standards

Highlights Agricultural academic standards have different distribution among even some heavily agriculturally involved states. Education standards that pertain to agricultural safety and health are more generic and focus on farm machinery and livestock handling. Education standards that pertain to agricultural biosecurity are more general and tend not to focus on specific biosecurity areas of identification and prevention. Abstract. This article examines the published agricultural education standards from California, Indiana, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and The National Council for Agricultural Education. The overall aim was to access the attention given to, or inconsistencies in, agricultural safety, health, and biosecurity standards that are increasingly becoming central to agricultural production. This effort was part of a curricula design project to expand and enhance the Gearing Up for Safety – Production Agricultural Safety Curriculum for Young and Beginning Workers to ensure adequate coverage of biosecurity topics in secondary education programs. Agricultural education programs which involved topics of safety, health, and biosecurity, included curricula with outcomes and objectives that are created from competencies or standards. It was found that current standards give little attention, generally, to agricultural safety, health, and biosecurity. The academic standards reviewed had little consistency in the associated topics of safety and health, or biosecurity. The National Council for Agricultural Education and Wisconsin agricultural safety, health, and biosecurity standards constituted around 20% of the overall agricultural standard count. However, in most other states, the overall agricultural safety standards constituted as little as 3% of the overall standards. The lack of consistency in the standards, especially with respect to identification of desired learning outcomes makes curricula development efforts more difficult and less likely to meet actual needs in the field. The need to develop uniform educational standards that reflect the increasing importance being given to food safety, biosecurity and workplace safety and health was identified. Keywords: Agricultural academic standards, Agricultural health, Agricultural safety, Biosecurity standards, Education standards.