Abstract
Over the past five years educators from the University of Florida, IFAS Extension, have offered a landscape rodeo to green industry professionals along Florida’s Treasure Coast. The rodeo was introduced as a mechanism for students to reinforce what they learned in the classroom by providing a venue for hands-on learning. The rodeo is held once a year in January and consists of “education stations” where participants are rotated through each station every 50 minutes. At each rotation, participants are actively engaged in hands-on activities including fertilizer calibration and application, pesticide spill cleanup, safe use of landscape equipment and landscape integrated pest management. University of Florida, IFAS Extension agents and sales and service members from various green industry businesses provided the training and were encouraged to engage all students in learning activities. Following the training, a landscape competition was held with events in calibration and application of fertilizer and safe navigation of an obstacle course with a lawn tractor. The top three winners of each competition were awarded gift cards ranging from twenty-five dollars for third place to one-hundred dollars for first.
