America’s food and fiber systems determine the nations’ general welfare and standard of living. Today, nearly ninety percent of the population is two or three generations removed from direct contact with food and fiber production. As a result, youth know little about agricultural production, processing, marketing, distribution, regulation or research.

The National Research Council established the Committee on Agricultural Education in Secondary Schools in l985. This committee recommended that "beginning in kindergarten and continuing through twelfth grade, all students should receive some systematic instruction about agriculture." Since this report, many instructional materials have been developed to help youth learn about agriculture. However, educators and agriculturists have been slow to develop a K-12 systematic curriculum framework for food and fiber systems literacy.

This Guide to Food and Fiber Systems Literacy represents the culmination of four years of work in developing and testing a curriculum framework for Food and Fiber Systems literacy. The Guide is composed of a compendium of standards, benchmarks, explanatory narrative, and sample instructional materials for kindergarten through twelfth grade. It is intended to provide a road map for infusing Food and Fiber Systems knowledge into core academic subjects and across grade levels. Curriculum directors and school administrators can use this Guide to plan for infusion of Food and Fiber Systems literacy in their school districts and at school sites. Teachers will find this Guide useful in organizing instruction to achieve food and fiber literacy standards and benchmarks, developing teaching themes, and connecting existing instruction to Food and Fiber Systems standards and benchmarks at each grade level. Sample instructional materials will help teachers infuse Food and Fiber Systems standards and benchmarks. The examples lead teachers to discover how existing instruction connects to agriculture.

Teachers, curriculum specialists, school administrators and agricultural industry professionals were involved in the development of this Guide. Initial work was completed at the University of California, Davis. Further development and testing of the standards and benchmarks was completed in elementary and middle schools during the l997-l998 academic year in Montana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and California under the leadership of Oklahoma State University.

This Guide summarizes what America’s youth should know about Food and Fiber Systems to be agriculturally literate by the time they graduate from high school. We believe the Guide is useful to educators and agricultural industry professionals in setting the direction for future development of instructional materials and activities teachers can use to assist students in becoming agriculturally literate citizens.

James Leising,
Project Director