COURSE DETAIL
This course provides an interdisciplinary exploration of sustainable agriculture, food systems, and ecological practices within the context of the Mediterranean, with a specific focus on Sicily. Students engage with ecological concepts and principles fundamental to designing and managing sustainable agroecosystems, with a whole systems approach encompassing the multiple dimensions of sustainability. Local engagement is aimed at enhancing students’ critical thinking about global food systems, the SDGs and sustainable agricultural practices.
In addition to the core focus on sustainable agriculture and food systems, this course provides a deeper historical and environmental framing, exploring the long-standing cultural overlays that have shaped Sicily’s agricultural practices. Students examine the island's ecological history and agricultural evolution under indigenous, Greek, Roman, Arab, Norman and Spanish influences, while gaining insight into how historical globalization has impacted local food systems. Special attention is given to the role of commodity trade over time and its influence on current agricultural structures.
COURSE DETAIL
This course covers the application of management science methodology to various decision-making problems in the agricultural and food industry, models them mathematically, and derives optimal strategies. The course enables students to actually apply and discuss management science methodology to corporate cases related to the agricultural and food industry. Specifically, in this course, students acquire theoretical models for linear programming, network models, integer programming, nonlinear programming, multi-objective decision-making, decision-making under uncertainty, simulation, and queueing, and learn how to analyze them. In addition, it enables students to apply management science methodology to topics such as agricultural cultivation, food distribution and supply chain, and agricultural and food production planning, and derive and interpret results.