Agriculture and Public Garden Collaborations Yield Meaningful Impacts.

Public Gardens represent a unique opportunity to combat plant blindness and to increase food literacy by engaging diverse public audiences. The intimate role that food plays in all human cultures can provide a bridge to conversations that effectively increase knowledge and build public dialogue on critical agriculture issues. Collaborations between agricultural science entities and public gardens offer new ways to amplify efforts to impact public knowledge and land stewardship decisions.

Public Gardens have unique credibility as trusted science and conservation educators. As important centers of formal and informal science education, public gardens serve as a major source of climate change and sustainability information for visitors and students of all ages and skill levels. In order for the public to better understand food systems, it is necessary that public gardens become more widely adept in delivering the same high quality inquiry style museum programming when delivering agricultural content. While many botanical gardens have agricultural research as part of their historic identities, very few currently employ agronomists or professionals with agriculture science backgrounds. This session will feature case studies demonstrating how partnerships between agricultural science and public garden entities have successfully enhanced education and outreach programming with a lasting impact on community audiences.

Public gardens regularly reach beyond their gates to work on regional conservation issues. A significant number of gardens manage natural and agricultural land holdings. Many gardens use these properties to offer training to community members in ecological restoration or cultivating food and other horticulture products that can contribute to regional economic development. This session will explore how an integrated approach that pairs Agriculture and Garden partners can be mutually beneficial beyond dissemination of messaging. Increased dialogue and communication between garden professionals/scientists and agronomists can build capacity for all partners to address biodiversity and habitat loss, plant conservation, regional land use and management, and support for sustainable farming practices.