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Our School Gardens Are Changing! Busan Metropolitan City Launches Customized School Garden Consulting

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The Busan Metropolitan City Agricultural Technology Center announced that, in cooperation with the Busan Metropolitan City Office of Education, it is implementing the On-site School Garden Consulting Program to promote school gardens as experiential learning spaces connected to education and to foster students’ character development and ecological awareness.

As school gardens provide educational spaces where students can plant and tend crops themselves while learning about plant growth and the ecological environment, the Center plans to enhance their educational value by providing professional cultivation techniques and operational expertise.

The On-site School Garden Consulting Program matches each participating school one-on-one with an appropriate Urban Agriculture Manager based on the school’s requests and on-site conditions. The consultant then visits the school in person to provide consulting services.

Each consulting session lasts three hours and covers practical topics that can be applied directly at schools, including school garden development, such as selecting the location and type of garden, soil management, crop selection and layout, cultivation and growth management for individual crops, and pest and disease management.

In particular, 15 schools where new school gardens were established this year will each receive two intensive consulting sessions in consideration of the challenges involved in initial development and adjustment, while 40 schools with existing gardens will each receive one consulting session. In this way, the program is tailored to the circumstances of each school.

This year, the program will be implemented at a total of 55 schools. Consulting was completed at 37 elementary, middle, and high schools and special education schools across the city in the first half of the year, with an additional 18 schools scheduled to participate in the second half.

Through the program, the Center is not only helping schools address practical challenges on site but also contributing to local job creation by engaging and cultivating Urban Agriculture Managers with educational capabilities.

In the second half of the year, the Center also plans to provide three capacity-building training sessions for consultants to further strengthen their professional expertise and ability to respond effectively to on-site needs.

The Center will also conduct satisfaction surveys among participating schools to actively gather feedback from the field and incorporate the findings into future improvements to school garden programs and consulting services.

Park Mi-jin, Director of the Busan Metropolitan City Agricultural Technology Center, said, “School gardens are valuable educational spaces where students can naturally learn about the importance of ecology and agriculture by planting and caring for plants themselves. We will continue to provide customized, field-oriented consulting and actively support schools so that their gardens can be operated effectively and meaningfully.”