Visualizing the connections between places through agricultural trade networks

Daily food choices are shaped by complex environmental, economic, historical, and geographic forces that most people rarely consider. Geographic mapping and network analysis offer powerful tools for making these relationships visible and comprehensible to students. This work presents an agricultural trade network visualization activity developed for a lower-level undergraduate general education course on the geography of crops at a large state university. Using publicly available trade data from the Food and Agriculture Organization’s FAOSTAT database and geographic mapping tools in ArcGIS Pro, students construct and analyze ego-centric trade network maps for a crop of their choosing, visualizing the global connections between leading importers and exporters. The activity is grounded in a constructivist pedagogical approach that scaffolds content knowledge and technical mapping skills across five course modules, encouraging students to interrogate their assumptions about global food systems through hands-on engagement with real-world data. Key challenges include introducing students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to network concepts and GIS software, and these are addressed through scaffolded assignments, student autonomy in crop selection, and video-based tutorials. Student reflections reveal meaningful gains in conceptual understanding, particularly regarding the complexity and interdependency of global agricultural trade networks. This work discusses the activity’s design, implementation procedures, grading criteria, and potential adaptations for more advanced audiences, offering insights applicable to instructors beyond this specific course context.