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Agriculture

A collection of guides for the Agriculture program at Marian University's Ancilla College.

Animal Nutrition

Students will learn basic principles of animal nutrition as it relates to agricultural animals and practices. Concepts covered include foodstuffs, ration formulation, feeding, digestion, absorption, and measurement of body needs and characteristics of nutrients. This course is only offered at the Ancilla College campus.

Your textbook, A Guide to the Principles of Animal Nutrition by Gita Cherian, is an open source book provided by Oregon State University.  To access, please click the book title; you can choose to download or read online.  If reading online, you can navigate by clicking Contents left of the title.

Databases and Journals

Databases aren't actually sources themselves, but they are used to find sources such as books, journal articles, even videos.  They make it easier for you to search for articles on specific topics.  These library databases and BrowZine journal collections are the most likely to provide research articles pertinent to your topics in this class.

Journal articles are usually considered scholarly when they have gone through a process known as peer-review.  Peer-review means that experts in the field have looked at the research, provided feedback to the author and publisher, and made recommendations or requests for additional information, clarifications, and other suggestions for improvements before the article was actually published.  This is supposed to catch mistakes, unethical or poor research, and other problems before an article is released for others to read.  Magazine and newspaper (and journals that don't peer-review) are not considered scholarly since they don't go through this quality control process.  Usually, instructors will specify they want peer-reviewed articles.

Databases

Databases allow you to search hundreds of thousands of journals for articles specific to your search topic.  These databases are your top choices for agriculture and ethical considerations of animals.

Journals

While databases make finding articles in journals easier, sometimes it's good to go straight to a journal.  These journals focus on various aspects of crop production, soil management, and agronomy.  

Books

Books provide in-depth information on a topic; it may be a broad topic like zoonoses or it might be specific like Lyme disease treatment in domestic dogs.  Most scholarly books take a while to research, write, and publish, so watch out for older copyright and publication dates--a book published in 2024 could be pulling its information from before 2020, so if you need more up-to-date information, journals or trusted web sources may be a better choice.

Websites

Websites can be useful but they should always be from trusted sources.  Taking the first website listed on a Google search isn't always a good idea, and it can be difficult to sometimes tell if a site is reputable.  Look for sources that are from legitimate veterinary, health, or agricultural institutions or organizations, or from trusted government sites, as well as keeping an eye on the dates that the information was posted.  For some general or historical topics, the date may not be very important, but when talking about the latest treatments, you'll want to find more recent updates.