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Through Zoom, agronomy professor brings farmers from around the world to his students
In teaching students about crops and farming in other parts of the world, Valentín Picasso Risso often incorporates field trips closer to home — area greenhouses that grow tropical plants or Wisconsin farms operated by recent immigrants.
Those opportunities, of course, had to be temporarily halted due to the pandemic. In their place, Picasso Risso has been using technology to give his students an engaging global perspective.
Throughout the pandemic, he’s been bringing farmers from foreign countries into his classroom remotely through Zoom. The guest could be a cattle farmer in the Amazon region of Brazil. Another day, students might hear from a coffee grower in Honduras or a sorghum farmer in Malawi.