This Ecosia video is about a forest garden that provides food and income to a family in Senegal.
The garden is planted among trees and native plants, which helps maintain biodiversity, increases soil health, and provides nutritious food to the family.
Teaching Tips
Positives
This is a great example of a win-win climate solution that can reduce poverty and hunger, benefit biodiversity, and reduce damaging land use changes, such as deforestation.
Additional Prerequisites
You may want to periodically pause the video to make sure your students have time to read the closed captioning and translated text.
Differentiation
Social studies, math, or economics classes could use this resource as a way to discuss personal finances, the financial and social benefits of growing some of your own food, or to estimate a family's annual savings if a home garden was able to supply a certain percentage of their groceries.
Science classes could use this resource when discussing the carbon cycle, photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, or ecosystems.
Other resources to consider on this topic include this lesson about regenerative farming, this video about regenerative farming, and this table of solutions to climate change.
Scientist Notes
This resource interviews the Seck family, who are Senegalese farmers. They have converted their monoculture farm in favor of a forest garden, which are proven to be much more productive, and require less pesticide, resulting in healthier food. This resource is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
LS2: Ecosystems: Interactions, Energy, and Dynamics
MS-LS2-5 Evaluate competing design solutions for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services.
College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Standards
Dimension 2: Geography
D2.Geo.4.9-12 Analyze relationships and interactions within and between human and physical systems to explain reciprocal influences that occur among them.
