Livestock and Poultry Environmental Stewardship Currriculum (LPES)

Livestock Environmental Stewardship Team Announces New Curriculum

Increasingly, the environmental stewardship practices of the livestock and poultry industry are coming under scrutiny. Manure, depending upon how it is managed, can provide important agronomic and soil quality benefits, or it can become a significant environmental liability. Access to sound, science-based knowledge is the key to implementing good environmental stewardship principles among producers, advisors, and policy makers.

In 1999, a national team of experts in animal manure management was formed to develop materials that would provide educators, producers, and industry stakeholders access to the latest objective information addressing the issue of manure management. This team, consisting of 30 faculty and staff from land-grant institutions, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), and the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS), developed, peer reviewed, and pilot tested a national core curriculum that can be incorporated into and adapted for local educational efforts.

After two years of development, the 26-lesson Livestock and Poultry Environmental Stewardship (LPES) Curriculum now is available for general distribution. To introduce the LPES curriculum, the team has sponsored a series of educational workshops throughout the United States. Frank Humenik, North Carolina State University, a co-leader of the curriculum development team, says the workshops targeted Cooperative Extension educators, land-grant university faculty and staff, state regulatory staff, NRCS and Soil and Water Conservation District staff, and agricultural and commodity organization representatives. He says certified crop advisors, agribusiness representatives involved in the training of livestock and poultry producers, and producers themselves also benefit from attending the workshops and learning about the lessons and the self-assessment tools the lessons contain.

The U.S. EPA's Agriculture Compliance Assistance Center has financially supported this curriculum development effort with program oversight through USDA. The U.S. EPA Ag Center also provided travel grants to state teams to encourage the integration of LPES resources into a state's educational program plans.

The curriculum itself is organized into six modules: (1) Introduction, (2) Animal Dietary Strategies, (3) Manure Storage and Treatment, (4) Land Application and Nutrient Management, (5) Outdoor Air Quality, and (6) Related Issues. A Microsoft PowerPoint presentation with speaker's notes accompanies each lesson. Rick Koelsch of the University of Nebraska, a co-leader of the team that developed the curriculum, says "the curriculum, through its lessons and supporting visual aides for workshop presentations, provides those involved in producer education with access to high-quality, producer-targeted educational resources."

The LPES Curriculum is available for purchase in three formats from MidWest Plan Service (MWPS), one of the major participants in the project's development. One format is a searchable CD, which contains all 26 lessons as PDF files and a PowerPoint presentation to accompany each lesson ($25 plus $4.00 shipping and handling). A second format is a printed version of the lessons suitable for use in a three-ring notebook ($55 plus $7 shipping and handling). The third format is a two-CD set of the lessons in PageMaker format, which can be adapted for local and regional use ($25 plus $4.00 shipping and handling).

To order, go to the LPES web site, www.LPES.org, or visit the catalog section of the MWPS web site, www.MWPSHQ.org; email mwps@iastate.edu; call 800-562-3618, or write to MWPS, 122 Davidson Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011-3080. When ordering, be sure to specify which format of the curriculum you want. Visa and MasterCard are accepted; checks should be made payable to MWPS.

More details about the curriculum's purpose, content, and organization are available at the LPES Curriculum web site, www.LPES.org. Individual lessons are available for viewing and downloading from that site.

Livestock and Poultry Environmental Stewardship Curriculum