• Sustainable Futures
School just got cool as sustainable agriculture enters the classroom and Abu Dhabi’s future farmers are in the making
Madar Farms education programme is producing tomorrow’s tech savvy farmers
Utter the word farmer and an image of congenial Old MacDonald and his merry band of farmyard animals comes to mind. Or in other words, farming situations that are more traditional in nature, and ones, perhaps, that most school students of the 21st century are unlikely consider as a career option.
But change is in the air. Madar Farms’ Sustainable Futures educational programme is providing students and educators with an opportunity to view farming in a more modern light. “Maybe being a farmer is about being a data scientist or an artificial intelligence expert – a robot programmer,” says Tatiana Shahir, Head of Education & Community at Madar Farms. “Because of the tech innovations in farming, that industry goes from an old-fashioned ‘my granddad did that’ to maybe a future technology-based forward looking position.”
Madar Farms, a local indoor farming company, is on a mission to solve and address the food and water security challenges in the region and is one of the local farms in the UAE, serving the UAE as a country, with local produce.
To tackle such issues, Madar Farms uses several technology enabled farming methods - Controlled Environment Agriculture, Hydroponics, Vertical Farming. There is also an Education Department that comprises former teachers and underpins what is done at the farms. One key vertical within the department is its work with schools. “Our CEO Abdulaziz AlMulla has always been very clear about the awareness of the issues and the reasons why we farm sustainably, which is really critical for change and change only happens if people understand,” says Tatiana.
Madar Farms wants to teach the ‘WHY’, which is how the Sustainable Futures programme germinated as an initiative. “Why do we care about sustainable agriculture, why does it matter, why is farming so important to sustainability?”
To answer such questions, the Sustainable Futures is a hands-on, localised sustainability programme for UAE schools. Perfectly designed to be easy for teachers to integrate across different subjects and different extra curricula activities, it is explicitly, non-sequential and flexible for teachers.
“So for example, if I am a teacher and I want to give a lesson about climate change, because it is part of my learning framework, or if I go into a module about human food-print, there is really a great lesson already designed for me all about what on earth a food-print is,” says Tatiana.
The programme provides schools with several aspects – indoor Agtech, a garden for them to grow, and a modular curriculum that uses food as a springboard to explore a wide range of topics across the sustainability agenda, with lots of different lessons and resources across different themes that can be taught in any sequence.
“You can grow in class time, activity time or club times and that has to be sequential, since that is the natural order. So in the Growing our Garden module, kids go from planting a seed, to harvesting their own food to analysing their water savings over the project.”
The reaction of students has been immense. One school actually sold salads, similar to bake sales, while some students grew kale that wasn’t growing very well but they managed to work out a solution by themselves, causing the farming team to joke ‘we have some future hires in sight’… and Old MacDonald is nowhere in sight!
To find out more, visit madarfarms.co/ education