Cultivating Change
Agriscience education research takes a holistic approach

In Auburn’s Agriscience Education program, students and faculty members study a complex range of topics, from obesity, nutrition and food safety to bioenergy, climate-smart farming and the safety and health of agricultural workers. But Assistant Professor Dr. Jason McKibben’s explanation of what agriscience education means is very simple.
“Where agriculture and people touch, that’s us,” he said.
McKibben’s colleagues include Alumni Professor Dr. James Lindner, Associate Professor Dr. Christopher Clemons and Assistant Clinical Professor Dr. Jillian Ford. They mentor and supervise the research of dozens of graduate students who are preparing to work as educators, administrators and extension professionals.
Using the mission of the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to guide them, they encourage their students to study most any issue that affects people around the globe. That’s because, as McKibben explains, agriscience educators are problem-solvers.
“Agriculturists are sent into all sorts of strange situations to figure out how to help people,” McKibben said. “We take a multifaceted approach to solving societal problems that deal with agriculture through research and education.”
Much of the research produced by their students focuses on how to better communicate those types of concepts to the average citizen, and the faculty members’ areas of expertise span everything their students could possibly want to study.
“We take a more holistic approach,” Clemons said. “We’ve talked about obesity, energy independence, climate-smart agriculture, disaster preparedness, international development — agriculture touches everything.”
Hearing safety in agricultural education
Alumnus Dr. Garrett Hancock graduated from Auburn in May and recently accepted a tenure-track faculty position in Agriculture Engineering and Technology at Stephen F. Austin State University. His dissertation research focused on agricultural worker safety, but not in an area one might expect — he studied hearing health.
Hancock spent the last several years completing three separate studies for his dissertation, the first of which was recently published in the Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health. The bulk of his research was conducted with the help of undergraduate students in an agricultural mechanics laboratory (following standard hearing safety guidelines).
He began by asking students to consider at what decibel level they would start wearing hearing protection and what kind of protection they would use. He realized there was a shockingly large disconnect between their perception and the actual noise levels they were being exposed to. He found that educating students on decibel outputs directly through hands-on learning and indirectly through informational posters narrowed this gap.

“Students know that equipment and tools can be loud, but they might not be fully aware of how loud they actually are,” Hancock said. “While work still needs to be done regarding the overall hearing protection use threshold, the direct and indirect exposure positively affecting student understanding was exciting.”
Climate-smart practices for cocoa farmers in Ghana
Dr. Akua Adu-Gyamfi is another recent graduate who has accepted a tenure-track position in academia. She is now an assistant professor of agricultural leadership at Tennessee State University.
For her data collection, Adu-Gyamfi returned to her native Ghana, where cocoa farming is the primary source of income for most families. She measured farmers’ knowledge about climate-smart agricultural practices, which have been shown to increase crop productivity, decrease greenhouse gas emissions and allow farmers to adapt better to climate variability.
She found most cocoa farmers believe warmer growing seasons and shorter rainy seasons are negatively affecting their crops, and they are open to learning about and adopting climate-smart practices that can make them more resilient. However, she learned many lack the funding to do so, and there is no national credit system offering financial support to farmers in Ghana. The final section of her dissertation detailed the use of drip irrigation in Haiti, a topic she had been assigned to write about during her candidacy exams.
“That sparked my interest as it is connected to climate-smart technologies being scaled among farmers where sources of water for agriculture are scant,” she said. “In the future, I plan to study the intersection between training our workforce leaders in the food and agriculture businesses and climate adaptation and mitigation.”
Before beginning the doctoral program at Auburn, Adu-Gyamfi worked as an extension professional in Ghana and a food safety and security researcher for Tuskegee University in Alabama. She was one of just 12 students from around the world awarded a “Future Leaders Fellowship” to attend the Association for International Agriculture and Rural Development annual convention, where she was subsequently awarded The Guyton Foundation FLF Scholarship.
Engaging youth in agriculture
Alpha Sennon, a native of Trinidad & Tobago, is in just his second semester of Auburn’s agriscience education doctoral program, but he’s already a big deal.
A minor celebrity in the agricultural education world, Sennon has received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, given a TEDx talk in Amsterdam and been featured in Forbes magazine, not once but twice. The founder of an NGO called WHY FARM (We Help You-th Farm), he travels the globe speaking on the importance of agricultural education for children. Through his organization, he creates and distributes materials he calls “agri-edu-tainment,” including a comic book series called “AGRIman AGventures,” YouTube videos and a soon-to-be-released video game.
Sennon will focus his dissertation research on the best methods for building and maintaining children’s enthusiasm for agriculture. He plans to collect data about children’s attitudes from the teachers and community leaders of groups he’s already working with. After each presentation, he’ll survey the adults to determine whether he’s changed their students’ attitudes toward a possible career in agriculture.
“I haven’t been too much in academia, because I’m on the ground,” he said. “I’m on the farm; I see a hundred kids a day. Maybe I’m biased, but I feel like I already know what it takes. I’m grateful for the Auburn faculty and staff who have embraced my work.”
Lindner has been taking students to Trinidad & Tobago for research for decades. Through his family’s involvement in the agriculture industry, Sennon has hosted him and his students for years.
“I’ve known Alpha his whole life, since he was a little kid in Trinidad,” said Lindner. “He’s very passionate about what he does. He’s always had a passion for ag, and he never let it go.”