Agricultural Technology Projects, Lessons, Activities (25 results)
How will we feed the world population by the year 2050? The United Nations projects that by 2050 the world population will have risen to 9.7 billion people—more than 2 billion more people than today! To feed everyone, we will need a lot more food, which makes agricultural technology incredibly important. Agricultural technology is the use of science, engineering, and technology to make agriculture (farming) better. This can mean a wide range of things, including preventing plant diseases, gathering data to optimize crop yield (the amount of food you can grow on a piece of land), using resources like water more effectively, or even creating more nutritious versions of a vegetable!
Try one of the projects below to explore some of the solutions farmers, researchers, and engineers are trying around the world. Maybe you'll be working alongside them one day making sure we can feed everyone.
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Have you ever taken care of a plant? It can be tricky to get it right. You have to remember to water it regularly, and you also have to make sure to give it the right amount of water — not too much or too little. What if technology could help? In this engineering project, you will learn how to automate the entire process of watering a plant. Using a soil moisture sensor and a pump, you will build a circuit that will automatically detect when the soil is too dry, add water, and stop when…
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What do plants need to grow? Most of us would answer that they need light, air, water, and soil. But by using a process called hydroponics, you can grow plants without soil! How does it work? Try this project and see for yourself!
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Water is a valuable resource, and water shortages are a serious problem in many parts of the world. The problem can be made worse by people who waste water; for example, by watering a garden or using sprinklers on their lawn (or a farmer taking care of an entire field) when it has rained recently or the soil is already moist. How can you help conserve water and prevent such waste? One way is to build an electronic soil moisture sensor. This project will show you how to build a circuit that…
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STEM Activity
138 reviews
Do you think plants can grow without soil? If you've tried growing vegetables, you probably planted the seeds or seedlings in soil. Soil gives the plants the nutrients they need to grow. However, plants can grow without soil, too, using a process called hydroponics. In this activity, you will transform a bottle into a mini-garden that needs only light, air, and nutrient-rich water to grow!
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Growing crops takes a huge amount of water. That same water is also needed for drinking, bathing, and other industries. In dry climates or lands experiencing drought, there is a big push to conserve (save) water as much as possible. In this project you will experiment with creating environmentally friendly jelly-like materials called hydrogels and see if they can help soil retain water thus reducing the amount of water needed to grow crops.
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Do you ever have notebooks and papers left over from the school year? Do you recycle them? What if you could use them to start your garden instead? In this science project, you will upcycle old paper into seed cards and test how paper compares to other materials as a fertilizer!
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When you go to the supermarket, how do you pick out ripe fruits and vegetables? You might look at their size or color, or feel them for firmness. That might be easy to do when you pick out a half dozen apples, but imagine if you had to examine thousands of apples growing in a field, or strawberries coming down a conveyor belt getting ready for packaging. Suddenly, it is a lot harder to do yourself! What if a machine could pick and sort the produce for you? In this project, you will address part…
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Lesson Plan
Grade: 3rd-5th
7 reviews
Students will explore heredity concepts by comparing observable traits of apples and onions, collecting data on the traits of different apple varieties, and learning about apple production. Additional activities include hands-on methods for testing apple ripeness.
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NGSS Performance Expectations:
How are we going to feed the more than 9 billion people that will live on Earth by 2050? This is a major question for farmers, ranchers, and food scientists around the globe. It's a big problem, considering that from 2017 to 2050 we will be adding 1.5 billion people and need 20% more food. Linked to this problem of producing enough food is having enough land, water, and other natural resources to make that happen. The final solution will surely be made up of many different approaches working…
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Every day farmers around the world apply commercial fertilizer to their fruits and vegetables to improve plant health and yield. But applying commercial fertilizer is expensive and not economically possible for some farmers in developing countries. What if they could find a way to fertilize plants cheaply? It turns out that human urine is rich in the nutrients that plants need to grow. Could urine serve as a fertilizer substitute? Find out for yourself in this plant growth science project.
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