Unit 10 — June: Agribusiness and Ecosystem Connections
Description
The final unit integrates business and environmental concepts. Students explore agribusiness through financial literacy including personal finances, accounting, economics, and marketing. They develop and run a simulated business, making decisions on land purchase, crops or products, staffing, and profitability. A plant sale provides real entrepreneurial experience, with students growing succulents or flowers, handling storage, shipping, and packaging. Students design cost-effective fruit packaging. The unit concludes with ecosystem exploration through nature walks, identifying the school's ecosystem and recording observations. Students study food webs and ecological interdependence, identify wildlife through scat, bird calls, and skeletal features, and play ecological games reinforcing connections between organisms.
Essential Questions
- How do businesses operate in agriculture?
- What financial decisions are necessary for success?
- How are organisms connected in ecosystems?
- What roles do different organisms play?
Learning Objectives
- Understand agribusiness structure and economics
- Create a business plan and budget
- Make financial decisions
- Grow and sell agricultural products
- Design functional, cost-effective packaging
- Identify ecosystem types and characteristics
- Understand food web relationships
- Identify wildlife by multiple characteristics
- Recognize ecological interdependence
Supplemental Resources
- Graph paper for business budget and profit calculations
- Markers and poster board for business advertising
- Clipboards for recording field observations during nature walks
- Index cards for wildlife identification features
- Lined journals for ecosystem observations and reflections
Engineering, Technology, and Applications of Science
Crosscutting Concepts
Disciplinary Core Ideas
Science and Engineering Practices
Students engage in reading, writing, speaking, and listening tasks throughout all units. They conduct research on agricultural topics using informational texts, write blog posts and project reports, present findings to peers, and engage in collaborative discussions. Students summarize information from diverse media, quote from sources to support claims, and produce informative and opinion writing aligned to agricultural themes such as food systems, animal science, and natural resource management.
Students apply mathematical concepts across all units. They use measurement and unit conversions when testing water chemistry, calculating feed amounts, and designing chicken coops. Students collect and graph data from macroinvertebrate studies and plant experiments, calculate percentages for hatch rates and cost analysis, use area and volume formulas when designing agricultural structures, and apply operations with fractions and decimals in food science and agribusiness contexts.
Students apply scientific practices throughout the curriculum by conducting experiments, collecting and analyzing data, developing models, and constructing explanations. Topics including plant biology, animal systems, water chemistry, genetics, ecology, and food chemistry directly align with life science and earth science disciplinary core ideas. Students engage in engineering design when creating hydroponics systems and chicken coop structures, and they use crosscutting concepts such as cause and effect, systems and system models, and structure and function.
Students examine the history of agriculture, food production policies across cultures, the impact of natural resource use on communities, and economic principles of agribusiness. They investigate how geographic factors influence agricultural production and distribution, compare food systems across regions and nations, analyze the economic interdependence created by trade in agricultural products, and evaluate how cultural practices shape food identity. The agribusiness unit directly addresses economic concepts including supply and demand, entrepreneurship, and the role of resources in shaping economic opportunity.
Career readiness, financial literacy, and 21st century life skills are embedded throughout all units. Students explore careers in agriculture, food science, natural resource management, veterinary science, and agribusiness. They develop personal and entrepreneurial financial skills through agribusiness simulations, plant sales, and grocery cost analysis. Students use digital tools for research, collaboration, and data visualization, and they practice critical thinking, creativity, and communication in team-based agricultural challenges.
Formative Assessments
- Observations of business planning and product development
- Journals documenting nature walk and ecosystem observations
- Discussions on financial decisions
- Self-evaluations of business performance
- Group work on wildlife identification challenges
Summative Assessment
Projects including business plans and plant sales, lab reports on ecosystem studies, portfolio updates, blog posts on business and ecology connections
Benchmark Assessment
Pre-assessments on business basics, quizzes on food webs and ecology, unit tests on financial concepts
Alternative Assessment
Students may demonstrate understanding of agribusiness and ecosystem concepts through a combination of modalities such as oral presentation of business plan components, simplified one-page budget templates with visual aids, or guided teacher interviews about financial decisions and ecosystem relationships. Sentence frames, vocabulary word banks, and reduced scope (focusing on one key concept per task) may be provided as needed.
IEP (Individualized Education Program)
During business planning and simulation activities, provide graphic organizers or visual templates that break financial concepts such as budgeting and profit into manageable steps, reducing the cognitive load of holding multiple variables at once. Allow students to demonstrate understanding of agribusiness decisions and ecosystem observations through oral responses, labeled diagrams, or dictated journal entries rather than relying solely on written output. For ecosystem and wildlife identification activities, pre-teach key vocabulary with picture support and offer structured observation guides with sentence frames to scaffold nature walk journaling. Frequent check-ins and chunked task sequences will help students stay oriented during the multi-part plant sale and business plan project.
Section 504
Ensure students have extended time for business planning documents, packaging design tasks, and written ecosystem journals, and provide a low-distraction workspace during individual reflection or self-evaluation activities. Printed copies of any directions, financial templates, or observation guides shared verbally or digitally should be available so students can reference them independently throughout each phase of the unit. Preferential seating during discussions on financial decisions and ecosystem relationships supports sustained focus during these more abstract, language-heavy components.
ELL / MLL
Introduce key vocabulary from both the agribusiness and ecosystem domains — such as profit, budget, food web, and predator — using visual word walls, illustrated glossaries, and real objects or images before students encounter these terms in context. Directions for business planning tasks and nature walk observations should be given in short, clear steps, and students should be invited to restate instructions in their own words to confirm understanding. Allowing students to sketch, label in their home language, or discuss ideas with a partner before contributing to group work lowers the language barrier while keeping engagement high across both content areas.
At Risk (RTI)
Connect the agribusiness simulation to familiar real-world contexts — such as local stores, community markets, or household budgeting — so that financial concepts feel accessible and grounded before students apply them to their own business plans. Offer entry-level versions of the packaging design and business planning tasks that focus on a single decision at a time, building toward the full project as confidence grows. During ecosystem activities, partnering these students with supportive peers during nature walks and wildlife identification challenges provides immediate, low-stakes feedback and encourages participation without the pressure of independent written production.
Gifted & Talented
Challenge students to extend their agribusiness simulation by researching real-world agricultural market trends, supply chain ethics, or sustainable farming economics and incorporating those findings into a more complex, justified business plan. In the ecosystem strand, students can investigate the cascading effects of removing one species from the local food web, using scientific reasoning to predict and model ecological consequences beyond what is directly observed on nature walks. Encourage these students to make explicit connections between the two unit themes — for example, analyzing how ecosystem health directly affects agribusiness viability — and to communicate those connections through a medium of their choice such as a research-based blog post, presentation, or visual model.