ASHS 2024 Conference

FFAR Fellows:  Opportunities for Horticulture PhD Students - John Dole
Nurturing Knowledge: The Impact of Assuming Professional Role in Achieving Learning Objectives in Upper-Level Horticulture Courses - Shivani Kathi
Mid-semester Teaching Evaluations to Enhance Course Communication - Rebekah Maynard
Evaluation of Packback - an AI-Assisted Writing Program for Student Assignments in Horticulture Courses - Navreet K Mahal
Evolution Of An Undergraduate Tropical Crop Production Systems Course - Kent Kobayashi
Service-learning Horticulture Students Growing Food for Themselves and Others - Carl Motsenbocker
Assessing "Teaching Effort" to Ensure Fairness and Equity Across Diverse Course Types - Linda Prokopy

The Foundation for Food and Agriculture (FFAR) Fellows Program was launched in 2018 and has become the premier professional development program for food and agriculture doctoral students. The FFAR Fellows offers leadership and professional development training for PhD students studying food and agriculture-related sciences in the U.S. and Canada. North Carolina State University leads the initiative, which provides Fellows with training, networking opportunities, and peer support. The objectives of the program are to 1) develop leadership competencies that enhance current and future individual productivity and well-being, and enhance Fellows capacity to contribute to the public good, 2) connect young scientists across research domains and geographic areas to promote multi-disciplinary understanding and problem-solving, and 3) broaden students understanding of their career options and create links to sectors beyond academia (industry, government, NGO). Over a 3-year period members of each cohort (25-30 Fellows) attend four in-person meetings plus monthly virtual sessions, create and execute annual professional development plans, and network and establish mentor-mentee relationships with industry scientists and others outside of academia. Eligible students are those who have completed their MS degrees before the program starts or current PhD students with at least three years remaining in the program. FFAR provides 50% of the funds with the rest matched from industry, NGOs, commodity organizations, or other sources of non-federal funds. Deadlines are generally late February for the Stipend Professional Development Category (providing professional development $50,000/year in support) and mid April for the Professional Development Category (providing professional development). Application requirements will be discussed in the presentation. The research program of each Fellow must address one or more of the six FFAR challenge areas, five of which relate to horticulture: Soil Health, Sustainable Water Management, Next Generation Crops, Urban Food Systems, and Health-Agriculture Nexus. Approximately 7% of the 139 Fellows are from horticulture programs. There are opportunities for more horticulture PhD students to take advantage of this program.

Practical experience is invaluable to students majoring in plant-related fields including horticulture. Most times students with no prior practical experience acquire the required knowledge and skills to succeed in horticulture field through college education. However, there is limited literature on the impact of courses implementing experiential learning through students assuming horticulture-related professional roles on achieving learning objectives. Hence, the current study investigated the pedagogical approach of practical learning by incorporating students undertaking management role in achieving learning objectives of upper-level horticulture courses within a classroom setting. The methodology involves implementing this student-centered activity of assuming professional role as greenhouse manager and hydroponics operation manager in two different 3000-level courses (urban horticulture and hydroponics and soilless crop production, respectively) and assessing their impact on learning outcomes. Each student assumed the role of manager for a week and experienced real-world problem solving in greenhouse and hydroponics operation management settings. Quantitative and qualitative data collection methods, including surveys, and observational analysis, are utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach in enhancing students' understanding and attainment of course objectives. Preliminary findings indicate that incorporating assumption of horticulture professional role activities fosters deeper engagement, critical thinking, and practical application of theoretical concepts. Students reported increased confidence in their abilities to apply learned principles in real-world scenarios, as well as a greater appreciation for the complexities of urban horticulture and hydroponics crop production. Overall, this research highlights the potential of experiential learning strategies, such as horticulture professional role simulations, to effectively support the achievement of learning objectives while providing students with valuable insights into professional practice. Finally, the findings contribute to the ongoing discourse on innovative pedagogical approaches and their impact on student learning outcomes in higher education settings.

Effective course communication is critical to foster a positive learning environment. One way communication can be improved is by scheduling a mid-semester teaching evaluation to capture student perspectives on what aspects of the course are going well and what could be improved. By providing students with a platform to express their opinions mid-semester, instructors have access to timely feedback to improve their teaching methods while the course is still ongoing. In this study, a mid-semester evaluation was conducted in an asynchronous, online Fruit Production course with 27 undergraduate students and one graduate student. The students were given a link to an online survey to respond to specific questions about the course structure and an open-ended question for actionable feedback. The evaluations were voluntary, anonymous, and confidential to solicit honest student responses. By having students respond individually, it was possible to capture unique student viewpoints and consensus statements among the class with a 96% response rate. Students responded positively to some aspects of the course such as the use of hands-on assignments; however, course modifications were made only in response to critiques. The most notable feedback was 14.8% of the students responding that the course material did not feel manageable with 44.4% of the class spending more than the expected time on lecture assignments. Additionally, students requested more clarity on the assigned projects. The survey responses were summarized for the students along with specific ways the course would be adjusted to better meet the student's needs and enhance their learning experience. To address the students’ concerns, the course workload was reduced, and students were provided with a clear explanation of their expected level of engagement. Recorded instructions along with detailed written descriptions and templates of the projects were also provided to aid in transparency about course assignments. Overall, students were well receptive of the mid-semester evaluation and reported it improved their satisfaction with the course. Because students found the mid-semester evaluation valuable to their learning, the course modifications will be maintained for future semesters.

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-supported writing tools in higher education has been a hot topic since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in 2022. These AI-supported writing tools are intended to analyze written materials and provide feedback on the writing , including grammar, vocabulary, content, and structure. Packback (https://www.packback.co/) is one of the AI-supported online platforms that intends to improve student curiosity, communication skills, and critical thinking, and provides ease of assessment for instructors. Two instructors in the Department of Horticultural Sciences at Texas A

TPSS 300 Tropical Production Systems is a four-credit undergraduate crop production course. It has two lectures and one lab period a week. In Spring 2023, there were 16 undergraduate students registered for this every Spring offered course—12 TAE students, one NREM student, one Interdisciplinary Studies student, one Botany student, and one Hawaiian student. In Spring 2024, there were nine undergraduate students—six TAE students, one Botany student, one Journalism student, and one Elementary Education & Special Education student. The objective is to describe the improvements made to TPSS 300 based on student interests and emerging new technologies and disciplines in horticulture. Various teaching techniques were used including flipped classroom, small group discussions, class discussions, in-class activities, lectures, guest speakers, field trips, YouTube videos, and laboratories. With a BYOD format, students could review assigned materials and look up information on the Internet to aid group discussions. New topics were added such as agricultural drone technology and crop sensors and equipment for monitoring plant status. Besides inviting our department graduate students as guest speakers, department extension agents and faculty and faculty and graduate students from other departments were invited. A TPSS faculty with another department’s faculty discussed the regulations for drone use and gave a demonstration of flying drones. The TPSS graduate students spoke on breadfruit tissue culture and industrial production in Hawaii; innovative agroforestry in ancient ways; and taro in aquaponics. Extension agents spoke about food safety. A PEPS graduate student spoke on invasive pests impacts on palm species with a focus on the Pacific and Israel. Two GEO students demonstrated their experimental growth chambers and artificial lighting set up. The manager of our college’s greenhouse facilities provided a tour of the facilities, explaining maintenance and irrigation. The rigor of this course was increased through incorporating more mathematics and quantitative reasoning, growth analysis, yield analysis, crop modeling and simulation, computer applications in horticulture, and high technology in horticulture. Students commented that TPSS 300 was a valuable learning experience. The course provided diverse learning experiences and hands-on activities. The integration of graduate students, extension agents, and the greenhouse manager as guest lecturers into the course worked well, providing benefits to both the speakers and the students.

Organic gardening (Horticulture 2525) is a mandatory class for students in the LSU medicinal plants and sustainable crop production concentrations, where the focus of the lab is for students to intensively grow their own garden plot of vegetables and herbs in the fall semester. Students are mandated to grow at least 10 different crops and to use both direct seeding and using their own transplants to establish, maintain throughout the semester, and then harvest their plot. The course is a service-learning course and over the years the class have worked in establishing and maintaining community and school gardens, harvesting/gleaning vegetables from garden plots, and assisting with a local farmers market. The most recent classes focused on growing food in community plots for the LSU Food Pantry, a local food bank that is used by many students. Each week students are required to work in the community rows from the beginning of working and shaping the beds, applying and incorporating fertilizer, planting seeds directly into the beds, transplanting crops, and setting up trickle and overhead irrigation systems. Students maintain their own plots as well as the community rows by fertilizing, and applying organic pest management measures as needed. The harvest from the individual plots and the produce is left up to the students and all the students harvest, wash, pack and prepare the product from the community rows for donation each week to the campus food pantry. Students are encouraged to participate my transporting the produce at least once, from the field or the cooler at the teaching facility to the food pantry. Many of the students have indicated that the class is the first time they had grown any plants in a garden and they used the garden harvest in their own kitchens. Students also indicated that they learned about the needs of the community and students and several also became aware of the food pantry and its services. In the fall of 2023 over 1,800 pounds of fresh vegetables were donated to the campus food pantry. Data from the students’ perceptions and comments from the semester will be presented.

An ongoing and challenging issue for all administrators who have to assign teaching responsibilities is assessing “effort” associated with different types of courses. While it is abundantly clear that different amounts of effort go into lecture classes versus lab classes, we still frequently talk about teaching responsibilities as the “number of classes taught per semester.” In the department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Purdue University, we faced this challenge across lecture courses, lab courses and Landscape Architecture studio classes. We undertook a year-long effort to assign “effort” values to each of our classes. In this presentation we will discuss our philosophy and approach to this undertaking, including how we engaged the entire department in the process. We ultimately developed a complex spreadsheet (currently being converted to an interactive database) that assigns points to classes based on number of contact hours, preparation work, service learning or experiential experience, grading/management workload, and class size. We then used this information to determine where additional support, in the form of graduate or undergraduate student TAs or staff, was most needed to create equity across teaching loads. This work is ongoing and needs to be updated annually based on changes in course structures and sizes and teaching assignments. In this presentation, we will share the database we created to make annual updates easy and transparent to everyone in the department.

Sponsoring Professional Interest Groups
Technology: Coordinator Milt McGiffen - milt.mcgiffen@ucr.edu
Teaching Methods: Coordinator, Kathryn Orvis – orvis@purdue.edu
Controlled Environment: Coordinator, Kent Kobayashi - kentko@hawaii.edu

Supporting Professional Interest Groups
Federal Partners: Matthew Mattia - Matthew.Mattia@usda.gov
Plant Biotech: Kedong Da - kda@ncsu.edu
Ornamentals/Landscape and Turf; Youping Sun - youping.sun@usu.edu
Local Food Systems: Charles H. Parrish II - chip.parrish@pm.me

Artificial intelligence and related topics, e.g., robotics, have been a long time coming in agriculture. For decades there have been predictions of intelligent robots replacing humans, and large farms run by a few humans with many autonomous tractors and other devices. But with the now widespread use of artificial intelligence in everyday life,
the moment has arrived. We developed this colloquium by casting a wide net out to all the Professional Interest Group Chairs, and have assembled talks and demonstrations from general topics to specific applications.

Two online meetings were held, where Professional Interest Groups officers and those interested suggested speakers and discussed topics. Further discussions over email helped fill in the details to create this colloquium.

We will have a block of speakers for the diverse topics we present below, as well as panel discussions on how AI is and can be incorporated into various aspects of Horticulture, so that there is ample time for questions and discussion.

Title: Overview of the Colloquium

Speaker: Milt McGiffen, Cooperative Extension Specialist, Department of Botany and Plant Sciences,
University of California, Riverside, CA.

AI in Ornamentals

Title: FloraCount: An App for Rapid Assessment of Pollinator Attractiveness to Annuals and Perennial Plants.

Description: Customers are interested in buying annuals and perennials that support pollinators. Protocols for rapid assessment in flower trail evaluations are not available. We have developed a mobile app that can be used to analyze in real time the users’ observational data and quantitatively rank the relative utility of observed cultivars to pollinator communities. This app takes into account pollinator groups, relevant floral characteristics and landscape.

Presenter: Harland Patch
Assistant Research Professor
Department of Entomology
Penn State University
549 Ag Sciences & Industries Building
University Park, PA 16802

Title: Approach to Biodiversity Protection: Employing AI and IoT Systems for the
Containment of Box Tree Moth Proliferation.

Description: The box tree moth (BTM, Cydalima perspectalis) is an invasive pest first confirmed in Niagara County, New York in 2021. This invasive pest can significantly damage and potentially kill boxwood (Buxus species) plants if left unchecked. This presentation describes our advances in combining deep learning algorithms for enhanced computer vision with IoT-enabled smart traps, to facilitate the early detection and continuous monitoring of BTM populations and to protect the prevalent ornamental boxwood in U.S. landscapes.

Presenter: Yanqiu Yang (she/her)
Ph.D. Graduate Research Assistant
Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Pennsylvania State University
3 Agricultural Engineering Building
University Park, PA 16802

Title: Landscapes from Words: The Future of Landscape Design with AI.

Description: The ongoing text-to-graphic artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has the potential to change the field of Landscape Architecture dramatically. The ability to produce original high-quality graphics, manipulate the viewer's perspective of images, and amend the rendering style through text inputs are significant advancements that will
inform new design process models. These changes can lead to expanded design exploration, improved accessibility for non-designers to contribute to creating visual concepts, enhanced ability to integrate data analysis and visualizations, and streamlined collaboration between clients and project stakeholders using a shared visual language. This talk focuses on two dimensions of change that may result from the rapid evolution of text-to-graphic AI, including (1) faster iterations and exploration of design options and (2) the advancement of methods that result in more inclusive and responsive design. In the classroom, students are just beginning to acknowledge the existence of text-to-graphic AI, which allows them to experiment with text-based design options that allow them to quickly visualize and explore a wide range of site program alternatives. Nevertheless, how do we manage the ethical and creative boundaries within an academic setting? In a research context, methods supporting rapid manipulation of both generated images and existing landscape photography represent advances that allow for greater collaboration surrounding landscape design decisions (Incorporating resilience strategies, protecting vernacular landscape elements that support a sense of place, or representing new design proposals that modify the landscape). These approaches allow stakeholders to gain remarkable advances in influencing the design process through shared visualization development. However, as with any emerging technology, practitioners, educators, and researchers need to respond to the challenges presented by text-to-graphic AI by developing and testing new design process models and public engagement techniques that can improve landscape decision-making and streamline collaboration.

Presenter: Aaron Thompson
Assistant Professor
Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture
Purdue University
625 Ag Mall Drive
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Title: Developing Guidelines for Extension’s Use of ChatGPT and Other Generative AI
Tools.

Description: A new technological era marked by the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has necessitated the need to navigate this domain with a compass of ethicality, safety, and effectiveness. Penn State’s experience developing guidelines for Extension’s use of
generative AI tools which will be shared and discussed.

Presenter: Michael Masiuk
Assistant Director – Horticulture Programs
Penn State Extension
342 Agricultural Administration Building
University Park, PA 16802

Panel: 30 minute panel with the above speakers, to allow time for Q&A and discussion.