Food and Agriculture Courses

BFI is sponsoring a new course for the Fall 2024 semester through the Hass School of Business on the current challenges within the food supply chain, including the way that current infrastructure has fueled excess GHG emissions, chronic diet-related diseases, biodiversity loss, declining soil health, and more. Taught by Professors William Rosenzweig & Helene York, this new undergrad course will also lead students through dynamic case studies of supply chain innovations and showcase the food systems career pathways.

The Summer 2024 Agroecology Field Quarter is a full-time, 7-week residential and traveling field study course, based mostly in hands-on experiential learning activities on the land, with visits to academics, farmers, and community-based organizations that are leading Agroecology research, extension and farming operations. The program will run from July 8th through Aug 23rd. Enrollment is open to all UC campus students and students from outside the UC as well.

In 2018 and 2023, BFI offered a seminar at UC Berkeley that brought experts on the Farm Bill to campus with the goals of understanding the general framework of this important legislation and identifying areas of particular interest for further study. Students critically analyzed the Farm Bill’s history, structure, and implementation, contributed to real-time discussions, and built skills in policy analysis, debate, communications, and coalition-building.

Edible Education 101 is a hybrid public lecture series and for-credit class in partnership with the Edible Schoolyard Project and UC Berkeley. It has been offered to undergraduate students and members of the public since 2011, and explores the future of food, its diverse systems, and movements. The course is offered free to the public through the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, both in person and through a virtual stream. Lecture topics have included organic agriculture, food safety, hunger, farm bill reform, farm-to-school initiatives, agroecology, labor in the food system, urban agriculture, food sovereignty, and local food economies.

The DeCal Program is an aggregate of student-run courses at UC Berkeley in which students create and facilitate their own classes on a variety of subjects, many of which are not addressed in the traditional curriculum. This DeCal explores agroecology as decolonial praxis. It is structured in two parts: 1.) guided grounding in social and political critical theory, and 2.) hands-on agroecological farming practices through workshops and labs at the Oxford Tract on campus.