Course Search Results

  • AGR 110: Introduction to Sustainability

    3.00 Credits
    Pennsylvania Highlands Community College

    This course treats sustainability as a broad area of inquiry, one that is rapidly changing as we develop new knowledge of human practices that are more or less sustainable. The gaps in current knowledge are great, but the task of growing a more sustainable global community is greater. We are faced with immense challenges that grow more critical by the day. This course will focus on the social, political, economic, and environmental complexity of the task of sustainability, which often confounds and defeats simplistic approaches. Nevertheless, many of the solutions lie in a simplification of our approach to community and commerce. This course will provide students with a broad understanding of sustainability in the multiple human dimensions that it is manifested.
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  • AGR 115: Botany Lab

    1.00 Credits
    Pennsylvania Highlands Community College

    This course provides lab-based training in botany and applies the principles taught in AGR 105, Botany lecture. The students will have the opportunity to conduct hands-on activities associated with plant anatomy and morphology, metabolism, classification, genetics, plant diversity, and plants and their relationships to humans. Corequisite:    AGR 105
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  • AGR 120: Hydroponic Food Production

    3.00 Credits
    Pennsylvania Highlands Community College

    Hydroponics is the science of growing plants in a soilless, biologically-controlled and ecologically-balanced environment. Though hydroponics is not a new method for the cultivation of crops, it is an evolving science. Hydroponics typically suggests the methods of plant propagation in water. However, it can be more properly referred to as soilless plant cultivation, which includes any method of growing plants without the use of soil as a rooting medium. Inorganic nutrients needed by the roots are supplied via irrigation water. This course will explore the history of hydroponics, plant nutrition as applied to hydroponics, and other soilless growing options. Corequisite:    AGR 121
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  • AGR 121: Hydroponic Food Production Lab

    1.00 Credits
    Pennsylvania Highlands Community College

    Hydroponics is the application of soilless culture techniques for the growth of plants. This course will reinforce the concepts of hydroponic food production learned in AGR 120. Students will learn the necessary components of hydroponic systems and apply the techniques of hydroponics to grow common plant species. In addition, students will explore the cultivation of plants using self-designed hydroponic systems, commercial hydroponic systems, and greenhouses. Corequisite:    AGR 120
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  • AGR 125: Principles of Sustainable Agricultu

    3.00 Credits
    Pennsylvania Highlands Community College

    Food production ranks among the most environmentally significant of human activities. Agriculture is practiced in every corner of the planet and in all but the most extreme of ecosystems. Life-sustaining agricultural practices are, however, often linked to habitat and biodiversity loss, deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and increasingly to the extensive use of chemicals and non-point source pollution. Producing food uses twice as much water as all other human activities combined. In this context, and given new challenges posed by climate change, rapid urbanization, and shifts in the balance of the global economy, how will we be able to sustain or increase food production to meet the needs of 9 billion people while ensuring the ecological health of our agricultural systems and the green infrastructure our communities rely on? In this course, students will learn about the origins, major concepts, and current issues of sustainability in agriculture. Our society''s agricultural history has unfolded in such a way that we are just now trying to understand and create sustainability where it does not currently exist. Students will explore environmental, economic, and social considerations of sustainability in agriculture; and, at the conclusion of the course, be able to understand and explain the characteristics of the current agricultural system, the many components of sustainable agriculture and how they relate to each other, and ways that society is moving or could move toward a sustainable agricultural system. Corequisite:    AGR 126
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  • AGR 126: Princicples of Sustainable Agri Lab

    1.00 Credits
    Pennsylvania Highlands Community College

    How can we balance the multiple, often competing, objectives of sustainable agricultural intensification to promote both agricultural productivity and human well-being? The answer to this requires a transdisciplinary, agroecological perspective. Agroecology is the integrative study of the ecology of the entire food system, encompassing ecological, economic, and social dimensions. This course is designed to introduce various topics in agroecology. Students will take an ecosystems approach to the study of agriculture that will enable them to analyze the environmental, social, and economic interconnections within various types of agricultural models locally and globally. The goal of this course is to give students a basic understanding of the interactions between agriculture and the surrounding environmental matrix leading to sustainable food systems. Students will integrate concepts across agronomy, ecology, biogeochemistry, soil science, and hydrology. Corequisite:    AGR 125
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  • AGR 130: Plant Propagation

    3.00 Credits
    Pennsylvania Highlands Community College

    The manipulation of plant reproduction is the basis for plant propagation which, in turn, is one of the fundamental and characteristic activities of horticulture. Any individual working with horticultural crops must understand the natural and induced genetic variation in such plants and how this variation is managed. To be effective in propagating plants both the biological bases and the commercial practices must be studied and understood. All aspects of plant propagation will be studied including methods of propagating by seeds, bulbs, divisions, layers, cuttings, budding, grafting, and micropropagation. The timing, techniques, and materials for making cuttings, environmental conditions, and media requirements for rooting cuttings of ornamental plants, fruit trees, shrubs, and flowering plants will also be studied. Various propagation structures, soils, and fertilizer requirements will be considered. Emphasis is placed on the basic principles of plant propagation to provide an adequate background in the areas of agronomy, horticulture, forestry, and other disciplines of plant science. Corequisite:    AGR 131
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  • AGR 131: Plant Propagation Lab

    1.00 Credits
    Pennsylvania Highlands Community College

    This course is a detailed study of the concepts, techniques, equipment, and facilities involved in sexual and asexual multiplication in plants. This course will explore the scientific theory and commercial practices of plant propagation by spore, seed, cuttings, layering, division, budding, grafting, micropropagation, and specialized structures. Upon completion of this course students will have a thorough understanding of plant propagation and be able to apply this knowledge to solve problems and work as a propagator. Corequisite:    AGR 130
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  • AGR 140: Agricultural Food Safety

    3.00 Credits
    Pennsylvania Highlands Community College

    Agriculture Food Safety focuses on presenting agricultural practices as they relate to the production of farm products from a food safety standpoint. Topics include currently used food safety programs to control biological, chemical and physical hazards and assure the safety of foods, the application of current technologies in reducing foodborne illness, specific guidelines for some key agricultural commodities, regulating and monitoring food safety guidelines, and an introduction of regulations such as Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), Good Agricultural Practices (GAP), Good Harvesting Practices (GHP), and Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP). Corequisite:    AGR 141
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  • AGR 141: Agricultural Food Safety Lab

    1.00 Credits
    Pennsylvania Highlands Community College

    This course provides lab-based training in botany and applies the principles taught in AGR 140, Agricultural Food Safety lecture. Students will conduct exercises dealing with food preservation, spoilage, and food poisoning. Basic techniques for the isolation, identification and quantification of specific microbes occurring in foods are assayed. Students will also learn techniques to identify bacteria in food. Corequisite:    AGR 140
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