Sustainable Agribusiness

Offered By: Doane University via edX

Course Description

Overview

The Sustainable Agriculture MicroMasters program provides you the knowledge to create a healthy environment, economic profitability, and social and economic equity. Its fundamental purpose is to help you meet current societal needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

You will learn that sustainable agriculture is more than a collection of sustainable agriculture methods and practices. It is also a process of negotiation: a push and pull between the sometimes competing interests of an individual farmer, a community, a nation, or geo-political groups as they work to solve complex problems about how to grow crops and livestock.

As a practitioner of sustainable agriculture — manager, grower, food processor, distributor, retailer, consumer, waste manager, or policymaker — the Sustainable Agriculture MicroMasters program will equip you to play a role in ensuring a sustainable agricultural system. A systems perspective is essential to understanding sustainability and implies interdisciplinary efforts.

You will gain an understanding of the importance of the sustainable agriculture system in its broadest sense, from the individual farm, to the local ecosystem, and to communities affected by crop and livestock production practices, both locally and globally. An emphasis on the system allows a larger and more thorough view of the consequences of crop and livestock practices on both human communities and the environment. A systems approach gives you the tools to explore the interconnections between agriculture and other aspects of our environment.

Farmers, laborers, policymakers, researchers, retailers, consumers, and managers have a responsibility to reach toward the goal of sustainable agriculture. This MicroMasters program provides you with the fundamental knowledge so that you can uniquely contribute to strengthen the sustainable agriculture community.

Syllabus

Courses under this program:
Course 1: Agri-Food Systems Analysis

This course will provide an introduction to critical skills for understanding and evaluating sustainability metrics in relation to Agri-Food systems.

Course 2: Sustainable Agri-food Marketing

This course examines the principles and practices of sustainable marketing in the agri-food industry and marketing’s role in the creation and management of relationships with customers and other stakeholders.

Course 3: Environmental and Natural Resources Economics

Economic analysis of agricultural problems associated with use of renewable and nonrenewable environmental and natural resources.

Course 4: Agricultural Economic Modeling Tools

Learn how to utilize Agriculture Modeling tools to achieve economic and sustainability outcomes.

Course 5: Global Food Futures and Agri-food Systems Solutions

Learners will analyze proposed solutions to some of the most pressing agri-food challenges and participate in creating innovative solutions to build a global food system in the face of rapidly changing climates, minimizing harm to Earth’s natural systems.

Course 6: Sustainable Agri-food Supply Chain Management

Learn how to manage a sustainable agri-food chains that operates in a manner that exploits and optimizes the synergies among environmental protection, social fairness and economic growth.

Course 7: Sustainable Agribusiness Comprehensive Exam

Take the Comprehensive Exam and demonstrate the knowledge and skills acquired in the Sustainable Agribusiness MicroMasters program to earnyour DoaneX MicroMasters credential.

Courses

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8 weeks, 10-15 hours a week, 10-15 hours a week
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Agri-Food systems are at the heart of at least 12 of the 17 United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The wide scope of the SDGs call for holistic approaches that integrate previously “siloed” food sustainability assessments. It recognizes that these systems cut across ethical, social, economic, political, environmental, and ecological issues that cannot be addressed independently.

Food systems have evolved into highly complex supply chains, where changes due to new policies, products, or technologies can have diverse and unanticipated repercussions. To be effective, learners will understand the need of a country-level collaboration among different ministries—finance, commerce, agriculture, health, environment, etcetera—and across countries affected by common problems. Learners will consider in an agri-food systems analysis the current or future sustainability status, detecting trade-offs across different economic, environmental, and social elements, and considering serious realities while offering a tractable way forward for policy and decision makers.

Learners will recognize the food system as a supply chain that is managed by diverse actors with competing interests and goals. Along the way, the management of the food system is shaped by changes in natural resources, markets, policies, technologies, organizations, and information.

Learners will investigate the ecosystem and biodiversity impacts of food systems that include other drivers that come from outside the food system, such as lifestyle changes, health care policies, energy policies, cross-border atmospheric deposition of nitrogen, or nonfood employment opportunities. Learners explore economically invisible impacts, together with their impacts on human health, global climate change, and community livelihoods to provide economic and social importance so that policymakers and business leaders recognize and respond appropriately. The global society is accustomed to managing what gets analyzed, measured, and valued. Analysis and valuation is a must, because without it, human responses are either muted or missing, be they policy responses, business responses, or citizens responses.
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8 weeks, 10-15 hours a week, 10-15 hours a week
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The learner will explore sustainable marketing and incorporate the motivations, drivers, and impacts of food innovation to create effective marketing strategies and plans that support the sustainability of the agri-food industry. They will take the long-term view that includes multiple scales local, national, and global, envisioning different possibilities for the future of food. Leveraging the best communication and media to eliminate the old while promoting the new products, programs, and systems matters immensely in getting the population to adopt a sustainable food futures model.

Learners will imagine, create, and promote the food futures they want for their organizations, their communities, and the world. Learners will also identify target audiences and needs, and develop authentic positioning, distribution, promotion and communications for sustainable agri-food systems.
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8 weeks, 10-15 hours a week, 10-15 hours a week
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How can we create a sustainable society that protects the environment while maintaining a prosperous society? Why have humans caused environmental degradation on local, regional, and global scales, and what can we do about it? Public officials, nonprofit organizations, and private businesses need professionals who can answer these questions in order to design a new sustainable world.

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources, including how markets function and how incentives affect people’s, businesses’ and institutions’ behavior.

Within economics, environmental and natural resource economics is the application of the principles of economics to the study of how environmental and natural resources are developed and managed. It focuses on weighing the private and public implications of choices that we make ranging from a local through a global scale. Learners will apply economic tools to evaluate the allocation and utilization of natural resources and the management of the natural environment within agriculture.

Learners will also focus on the importance of agricultural economics through the analysis of agricultural problems associated with socially optimal use of renewable and nonrenewable natural resources over time including problems of common property resources, irreversible forms of development, and preservation of natural areas. This course will also examine the effects of economic growth on the environment; application of economic theory of external diseconomies, cost-benefit analysis, program budgeting, and welfare economics to problems in an agricultural environment.

With increasing competition for limited land, water and other natural resources throughout the world, as well as growing concern about environmental degradation, there is a growing need for professionals who can assist in the process of balancing economic and environmental tradeoffs. Learners will be well-prepared upon completion of the course to contribute to the goals of organizations and agencies in both the private and public sectors by providing a strong basis to guide policy and management choices that directly and indirectly affect our environment.
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8 weeks, 10-15 hours a week, 10-15 hours a week
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Agricultural system models play increasingly important roles in creating sustainable agriculture businesses across diverse agro-ecological and socio-economic conditions. Agricultural system models are being used for various types of landscape-scale, national, and global modeling and analysis. Models provide information to land managers, policymakers, and the general public that inform management practices, public policy design, research and development, and investment decisions in order to maximize sustainability goals.

Learners will use models as "thinking tools" to inform strategy by looking at how different variables in different magnitudes and times affect outcomes in specific contexts. Understanding and using models are preferred versus field and farm experiments that require large amounts of resources and may still not provide sufficient information to identify appropriate and effective management practices.

This course will explain how manipulation of a sustainable agriculture model helps learners focus onagriculturalsystems as a whole and understand the multiple variables that interact within that system to achieve economic and sustainability outcomes
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8 weeks, 10-15 hours a week, 10-15 hours a week
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This course is part of the Sustainable Agribusiness MicroMasters program which consists of 6 courses and a capstone exam. After completing the program, you can also apply to Doane University to complete your MBA online for approximately $10,500 (learn more about the program here).

This comprehensive capstone exam includes the evaluation of the competencies and performance tasks, which define a successful practitioner of sustainable agriculture.

This capstone exam is part of the DoaneX Sustainable Agri-business MicroMasters program that is designed to provide you with the in-depth knowledge and skills needed to equip you to play a role inpracticingsustainable agriculture,utilizing a system's perspective to understand sustainability with interdisciplinary efforts. In order to qualify for the MicroMasters Credential, you will need to earn a Verified Certificate in each of the six DoaneX Sustainable Agri-business courses as well as pass this final comprehensive capstone exam.

The capstone exam will test knowledge across all six courses. It will be a webcam proctored timed exam.
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8 weeks, 10-15 hours a week, 10-15 hours a week
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Sustainable agri-food chains should operate in a manner that exploits and optimizes the synergies among environmental protection, social fairness and economic growth. Today, societal stakeholders demand the management of a sustainable agri-food supply chain to incorporate a diverse and often inter-related set of issues relating to sustainable development. There is surmounting global pressure for corporate responsibility to transcend product quality and extend to areas of labor standards, health and safety, environmental sustainability, non-financial accounting and reporting, procurement, supplier relations, product lifecycles and environmental practices. Principles of accountability, transparency and stakeholder engagement are highly relevant to sustainable agri-food supply chain management. Sustainable agri-food supply chain management covers the concept of sustainability from the field to the supply chain level by providing learners with tools for improving their company’s competitiveness, sustainability and responsibility towards stakeholder expectations.

A key priority in corporate strategic design is for an organization to emerge as socially responsible and sustainable through environment protection with a focus on maintenance of biodiversity and prevention of landscape damage. As well as reducing and controlling the environmental footprint of their agri-food supply chains. In order to develop sustainable and competitive agri-food supply chains the learner will explore the unique attributes of sustainable agri-food supply chains (SAFSCs) that differentiate them from other supply chains. Insight will be provided to the learner on the three dimensions of sustainability; economic, social, and environmental that competitive SAFSCs need to accommodate. In response to pressures for transparency and accountability, learners who take on the role of a sustainable agri-food supply chain manager, will need to know how to measure, benchmark, and report environmental sustainability performance of their supply chains. This course provides an in‐depth examination of SAFSCs and the related decision‐making.
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8 weeks, 10-15 hours a week, 10-15 hours a week
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"The challenge is to deliver nutritious, safe and affordable food to a global population of over 9 billion in the coming decades, using less land, fewer inputs, with less waste and a lower environmental impact. All this has to be done in ways that are socially and economically sustainable." -Prof. Sir John Beddington, Government Chief Scientific Adviser

Are you aware that your daily choices about the food that you consume frequently affect people and the environment across the globe? As a global society, throughout diverse geographies, the effect of these choices are compounded. The learner will review environmental dimensions of sustainability to encompass health outcomes, social and ecological justice in order to expand their view of sustainable agri-food system and take action toward a more resilient and equitable future of food.

A global reality is that one in seven of the population is undernourished and two in seven are overweight in developed and developing countries alike. Given the scale and urgency of the challengeto feed the world from finite resources, and the variety of implications the ‘food problem’ entails, the global society must co-develop alternative future food systems. Learners will consider how the production and consumption of food can be shaped to match the future needs of the global population.

The search for innovative solutions calls for multidisciplinary critical inquiry and utopian thinking. Learners will evaluate emerging technologies, social behaviors, scientific breakthroughs, business practices, and global governance. Innovative food futures will be instrumental in ensuring all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food. The private sector, NGOs, researchers, and governments have created potential solutions that seek to address these challenges and to transform agri-food systems towards more socially just, resilient, and sustainable agricultural production, and distribution systems. Learners will critically evaluate these different strategies and proposed solutions for viability utilizing the available evidence to understand the environmental, social, and economic implications.

Taught by

Dr. Kathleen Kevany, Sarah Pittoello, Chaiti Seth, Diane Dunlop, Tasha Richard, Anil Giri, Debora Sepich, Amanda McKinney, MD, FACLM and Jeffrey Frohwein