Welcome to the internship I course,
This course help a student to get hands-on practice.
The Department of Crop Sciences /SAFS/UR-CAVM is organizing an Industrial attachment for Year3 students from all the options, Horticulture and Crop Production in the first semester of the academic year 2019-2020. This note is prepared for presenting the main conceptual ideas about that Industrial attachment.
Objectives:
- Helping students acquire the aptitude to understand the farming system and suggest ways for its improvement;
-Making student conversant with real plant production at the farm level;
- Offering to students an opportunity of having hands-on practice in agriculture by taking part in some of the activities that are conducted at the farm;
- Initiating students to the work in a multi stakeholder environment (starting with the farmers);
- Following all the crop production activities conducted on the farm in the period of the Industrial attachment ;
-Offering to the student the opportunity of joining agricultural theory to the practice;
-Enabling students to improve their thinking skills, attitudes, techniques and strategies required by the agronomic professions;
-Initiating students to the preparation of quality technical reports that can be published/presented in academic conferences/journals/seminars.
Aim of the course:
The main objective of this course is to become familiar with systems thinking, with analysis of farming systems, with the concepts of integrated crop and animal production systems within different socio-economic environments, organic farming, and how these concepts and approaches can be used to design improved farming systems. The underlying ecological processes and environmental interactions that influence functioning of these systems are also discussed.
Course content
Agro-ecological zoning -Typologies of farming systems - Analysis of farming systems -Participatory approach in testing innovative technologies in farming systems - design of improved farming systems – Biological nitrogen fixation - Concepts of organic farming – Characteristics of organic farming – Composting technique – Use of Crop Residues in farming systems – Socio-economic factors in farming system – Farming System Research Approach.
Leaning outcomes:
Having successfully completed the module, students should be able to:
- Define farming system, and describe the major farming systems found in Rwanda and elsewhere in the world;
- Understand the principles of production ecology and use approaches of systems analysis to analyse farming systems at different scales;
- Describe the major uses of different low external inputs technologies (Animal manure, compost, rotation, improved fallowing, biomass transfer and Alley Cropping) in relation to direct benefits and ecosystem services in their broadest sense;
- Understand the role of socio-economic factors in farming enterprises and assess their effects;
- Assess the agronomic sustainability of different agricultural systems for farmers’ livelihoods.
Cognitive/Intellectual skills/Application of Knowledge
Having successfully completed the module, students should be able to:
- Analyze problems with help of appropriate tools and define and evaluate relations between all aspects
- (Farm) Analysis at different scales and basic modelling of results
- Evaluate appropriateness of different agricultural systems
- Design suitable/improved agricultural systems
Dear students welcome to this course of food crop production,
Aim
This module aims at giving to the learners all knowledge about crop production of the major food crops which will enable them to improve their productivity in Rwanda
This module has 20 credits with three learning units:
-Legumes production: 7 credits
-Roots and tubers production: 6 credits
-Cereal production: 7 credits
This course will help the students to understand the origin of each crop, morphology of each crop, its behavior. Adaptability to ecological conditions, planting methods, package of practice of each crop, maturity indices of each crop, harvest and storage.