Academic and Applied Learning
If you want to learn about organics, Guelph is ‘the’ place to be. Whether your interest is choosing a novel elective, learning how to produce organic crops, majoring in organic agriculture, becoming a commercial urban organic market gardener, or pursuing graduate studies, we’ve got something for you.
Guelph is unique among Canadian universities in its approach to teaching organics.
- Both academic and applied learning are available.
- Six organic courses are on-offer (LINK), which can be taken independently or as the core of the B.Sc.(Agr) Organic Agriculture major. Each course is designed to expose students to a diversity of potential career directions, through visits to farms and processors, as well as guest speakers from the sector.
- To complement the academic courses, students can also learn through hands-on
experience at the newly established Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming
(GCUOF). The GCUOF is 1 hectare of land which is managed as a
commercial urban organic market garden, serving several on-campus buyers such
as the Bullring Café. Both its positioning in the northwest corner of the
Arboretum behind East Residence and a fleet of dedicated bicycles stationed at
the Crop Science building facilitate student access between classes.
- The program is designed to support the many types of careers demanded by the rapidly
growing organic sector, including farming and market gardening, but also international
development, graduate school, government, and business.
- The B.Sc.(Agr) Organic Agriculture major offers a high degree of flexibility to allow students to tailor their course load to their interests. Forty courses are required for an undergraduate degree at Guelph. Twenty of those in the organic major are common to all majors within the B.Sc.(Agr) degree. Just 6 focus on organics, leaving 14 electives or restricted electives for students in the organic major to choose from http://www.uoguelph.ca/registrar/calendars/undergraduate/current/c10/c10bsc_agr -oagr.shtml. Thus, students are free to concentrate their elective courses in anything from soils, to social policy, plant breeding, or marketing, depending on personal and career interests.
- Social as well as biophysical dimensions are explicitly integrated into each course, as well as in the design and management of the GCUOF. Each course has several teachers, bringing diverse disciplinary expertise to bear on some aspect of organics. The goal is to present students with the holistic reality of decisionmaking in real world organics.
