| Abstract: | Summary Courses and curricula in agriculture are traditionally organized within disciplinary boundaries, while study of integrated systems has been confined to aggregation of components and often superficial analysis. Agroecology is emerging as an integrative field that expands our focus to embrace the broad complexities of agricultural production and the entire food system. Education in agroecology must provide the skills and knowledge needed to design and evaluate new systems, as well as the capacity to vision into the future and anticipate the impacts of systems as well as new challenges that will face humanity. Agricultural universities need to be organized to prepare students to meet these increasingly complex challenges in the food and natural resource arena. Agroecology courses can build awareness and competence in using ecological principles to inform the design of future systems that are productive, economically sound, environmentally sustainable, and socially viable for the indefinite future. A model program in the Nordic region is presented as an example of one innovative curriculum. Study of the ecology of food systems can put natural resource, human population, and agricultural production into a balanced perspective that can guide our research and development efforts toward a sustainable food system for the future. |
