What is “Value-Added” in Agriculture?
An interesting post came through my email defining “value-added” in its purest form. This comes from the field of agriculture where value-added is often used to model genetic and reproductive trends among livestock, and from where it was taken and applied to the “field” of education in the 1980s.
Here’s the definition: “Value-Added is the process of taking a raw commodity and changing its form to produce a high quality end product. Value-Added is defined as the addition of time, place, and/or form utility to a commodity in order to meet the tastes/preferences of consumers. In other words, value-added is figuring out what consumers want, when they want it, and where they want it – then mak[ing] it and provid[ing] it to them.”
In education, the simplest of translations follows: “Value-Added is the process of taking learning (i.e., a raw material) and changing its form (i.e., via teaching and instruction) to produce a high quality end product (i.e., high test scores). Value-Added is defined as the addition “value” in terms of changing learning’s most observable characteristics (i.e., test scores) in order to meet the (highly politicized) tastes/preferences of consumers. In other