Our Guiding Language

What is Farm-Based Education?

Farm-based education is a form of experiential, interdisciplinary education that connects people to the environment, their community, and the role of agriculture in our lives.

Farm-based education promotes land stewardship, the value of meaningful work, and supports the local food systems that sustain us.

Our Mission:

The mission of the Farm Based Education Association is to inspire, nurture and promote farm based education.

Our Goals:

1. To join all farm-based education practitioners in an international association to facilitate a supportive environment for our work.

2. To serve as a resource for professional development, networking, employment, education, programming, and facilities management to reinforce and support each member’s farm-based educational practice.

3. To serve as a champion of and advocate for the growth of farm-based education programs and enhance the visibility of the field.

4. To be a sustainable, effective, and highly valued professional organization that exhibits, expresses, and administratively supports the vision, goals, and values of the organization.

Our Core Values:

We believe that farm-based education is among the most effective and promising forms of environmental, experiential, and place-based education because of the innate ability in all people to connect to farms.

We believe that farm-based experiences promote life values by relating to the social, moral, cognitive, and emotional aspects of the human experience.

We believe that hands-on learning on farms builds confidence, self-awareness, and individual and collective responsibility which leads to the sustainable stewardship of our world.

We believe that there is real pedagogical value to learning while working on a product or process that will have lasting value beyond the task at hand.

We believe that practical lessons on farms enhance and reinforce theoretical learning in schools.

We believe that farm-based education promotes respect for nature, manual work, individuals, and community.

We believe in the practice and promotion of sustainability in all aspects of society.

We believe that the raising of food is fundamental to our society and that all people should know about agriculture and where their food comes from.

We believe that experiences on farms affect participants far greater than the specific programming such that the peripheral experiential learning is deep, significant and truly transformative.

We believe that the natural rhythms and cycles seen and experienced on farms leads to a deeper and accessible understanding of the world.

We recognize that farms come in a wide variety of sizes and structures.   Educational activities at farms can be effective regardless of specific characteristics and products.  Farms can be owned, leased, for-profit or not-for-profit, raising vegetables, animals, fiber, timber, and other living natural resource products.  Educational farms can range from having a single teacher-farmer to a staff of hundreds.  Educational farms can serve all ages from infant visitors with their parent, through K to 12 grades, to university students and adults throughout their lives.

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