The Integrated Land Use Planning course of the Agronomy School of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul State, Porto Alegre, Brazil, associates Soil Science with other courses taught in Agronomy, establishing consistent and meaningful crosslinks. The course uses integrated land use planning to feed the compiled agronomical knowledge into a project of sustainable land use for one or more farms. The following sequence of procedures is used for this purpose: regional characterization, survey of existing natural resources, ascertainment of their actual use, production diagnosis, and elaboration of a project for sustainable farm use, which is presented to the local community. Results showed that the course was most useful to train and improve the students' abilities and was supported by students, farmers and organizations engaged in land use planning.
agronomy; undergraduate; soil; planning; land evaluation
