Agriculture Technology

Course Description

The content of the course is broken into 4 main areas: Introduction to Agriculture, Plant Production, Animal Production and Agricultural Systems and Management. The content learning is covered across 6 farm enterprises based learning units:

Year 9 - Vegetable and Strawberry Production, Sheep for Meat and Wool, and Chickens for Eggs and Meat
Year 10 - Cereal Crop Production, Beef Production, and Hay and Silage Production.

Half of the course time will include practical activities to support learning. These activities will be carried out in the vegetable plots, school paddocks, sheep yards, cattle yards and chicken pen and are designed to help apply knowledge learned in the classroom.

Engaging your imagination will help you understand and remember what we did during practical lessons. This is a very valuable aspect of the subject when writing examination responses. It’s an imaginary cheat sheet.

What will students learn about?

Agriculture currently feeds over 7.6 billion people and counting. Every day there are over 100 million extra people. They all need food and clothing. We in agriculture are responsible to make sure they get these basic needs. Therefore in this course, students will learn about the history of agriculture - where are we now and how did we get here? They will learn about our most valuable farming asset - soil.

Soil - What is it? Why does it make agriculture possible? Can what I do to my farm soil make it harder to grow plants and animals in the future? Can I manage soil to improve its ability to grow farm produce? Why is this important to know? Our knowledge of soils will logically link to our learning about plants and animals.

Plants - We will learn about the vegetables and grains your family eats. We will learn about the plants animals eat. Where did they come from? How have they changed? Can I grow them and school and how? How do we ensure we can feed a growing population. What do farmers do each year to provide us with food? What do they do to provide animals with food?

Animals - We will learn about how soils grow plants that feed animals, and also how animals can affect the soil and therefore the plants they eat. We will learn about how we as agriculturalist are constantly learning how to grow more kilograms of produce each year. How do we do this and make sure we don’t compromise the welfare of the animal?

We will apply our knowledge during practical lessons. The course will finish with a healthy competition to grow the best quality hay and silage. This is tested at the Department of Primary Industries who will judge the competition. Growing good hay and silage is based on our knowledge of soils, plants and animals. The winners take the cake - usually a caramel mud cake.