ILEIA Newsletter Vol. 11 No. 1 p. 22

Bringing the classroom closer to the farm: learning with urban farmers

Roberto Ugas

Isidora starts her working day walking along a dusty trail that leads to the lettuce field. Her task is to handweed from eight o’clock in the morning till noon together with Maria and a group of some five to six people, mostly women. The lettuce field is part of the 20 ha experimental farm of the University Vegetable Crops Research Programme.

Isidora almost disappears into the fog that covers this area which used to be outside Lima, but has now been engulfed by the megalopolis. Along the way she picks up some flowers of ‘capuli cimarron’ (Nicandra physaloides). The dew that accumulates in its flowers during night time is very good to relieve her eyes from the redness which has been annoying her for some days, she says.

Always carrying a kind of bag on her back – in the same way as she has carried all her children – she picks up some fennel leaves (Foeniculum vulgare) from plants growing close to an irrigation ditch. She will prepare an infusion to treat the stomach ache of Cirilo, her husband. Later in the morning, Maria takes some coca leaves (Erythroxylon coca) and ash from her bag, gives some of it to Isidora and starts chewing them like generations of highland people have been doing for centuries. The coca plant does not grow well along the coast so she gets it from the market.

While weeding she finds some wild tomato seedlings (Lycopersicon pimpinellifolium) and she transplants them along the edge of the field. Either she or her children can harvest the large bunches of small red fruits afterwards. As she goes along the furrows, with the instructions to tear out every plant but lettuce, her eyes unconsciously move around noticing the presence of a huge diversity of species.

Spring has just started and along with the typical winter weeds some summer weeds start to germinate. Agronomists call them ‘malezas’ or ‘malas hierbas’ (literally, bad herbs) because they are not supposed to be, or be left, in this lettuce field. Isidora calls them ‘monte’, which is the same generic term she uses to describe natural vegetation. And ‘el monte’ can be useful.

Picante

Some sweet corn plants are already outgrowing the lettuce seedlings. Isidora thins out most of them and leaves a few in place. Later, she hopes to harvest some sweet corn, and these plants can provide her with shade, quite welcome in the hot December weather. Many trees have been cut down to reduce hiding places for thieves or for fuelwood. She could also mix the dry stalks with some herbs and prepare a nice tea.

At noon, on her way back, she picks up broccoli flowers from a field soon to be ploughed. Broccoli looks like wild mustard flowers, the same that paint Andean slopes with bright shades of yellow. At the bottom of the largest ditch she collects some watercress and grass. Every day she collects grass for her guinea pigs. What she likes most, however, are ‘yuyo’ or ‘atacco’ (Amaranthus dubius) young plants.

They grow as weeds but Isidora tends and harvests them as crops, using them to prepare a nutritious ‘picante’ (local dish) together with potatoes, roasted dry corn, chili peppers and huacatay (Tagetes minuta), which also grows as a monte here. When she prepares picante her mind might goes back to the years when she was a child, when she could run and play freely in Ayacucho, under the clear Andean sky, when she could speak to the mountains in their own language, quechua. Not anymore, she and her family had to migrate, they now live in Lima.

From education to learning

I was born in Lima. Isidora used to work under my supervision. Agronomist by education, I was confronted with men and women like Isidora and their peculiar world of plants, animals and gods. I travelled in my country and became aware of its enormous diversity of peoples and cultures.

Things started to change, however, when as a student I overcame the pride of my highly respected academic education, a hard process that is still going on, and learned that field workers like Isidora could share with me not only their technical skills but also their agroecological knowledge and, surely, their wisdom of life. And that we can have fun together.

Reality does not fit on a blackboard or in a statistical design, but scientific schemes and education often forget this. Agriculture is a human activity and men and women are at the centre. Researchers are generally outsiders that need to be trained, but this education requires the division of reality into several compartments. Researchers need farmers to understand how the compartments function together. And the farmer needs the researcher to benefit from their perspective and, sometimes, insight.

Farm as classroom

Researchers were students before. As a vegetable crops teacher in La Molina Agricultural University, I met students in their final year, almost graduated agronomists, with hardly any practical experience. They even have the arrogance of a naive mind full of data. There is still a lot to be done in higher agricultural education in Latin America to bring the classroom closer to the farm, and to the farm house. Recent years have shown several encouraging efforts.

For example, we have seen students working with garlic growers almost inside the airport. Or successful biological control of potato pests inside a military compound. Or school gardens in the outskirts of Lima.

The dual nature of big Latinamerican cities, both urban and rural, makes them the immediate classroom for agricultural students. Urban and periurban agriculture is generally practised by people of rural origin. Students in agricultural universities, a majority of whom are generally of urban origin, will ironically form the bulk of the research community.

We should encourage, right from the start of their education, the relationships with urban and periurban farmers. After the first years attending classroom and urban farms, the student can spend considerable time during the final years in rural areas, both with commercial growers and small farmers. The thesis research, a requirement for graduation, could ideally come out of this process, carrying within it the interests and feelings of farmer and student and correct scientific methodology.

Current academic research will greatly benefit from this communication, as is already happening on a limited scale. But in a continent under structural adjustment there is no money for research and education. Knowledge can also be imported, they presume. So we come to the urgent need for a broader and more efficient collaboration between farmers, researchers, students, officials and members of NGOs. The task is to break the vicious circle of producing researchers and agronomists who are alien to the realities of agriculture.

Genetic diversity

And coming back to Isidora’s favourite vegetable: for universities in big cities in the Andes, and in several other regions of the world where agriculture was developed and plants domesticated, the conservation of plant and animal genetic resources presents a unique opportunity to work with urban and periurban farmers. Cities can also play a role in this effort to protect and promote indigenous plants and animals which are underutilised or disappearing.

Some years ago we started research on the commercial production of amaranth as a vegetable crop. Some years before that Isidora offered me a dish of picante for lunch. To work in a crop like amaranth is, for Isidora, an act of justice, and for the rest of us is a bet on the future.

Roberto Ugas, Programa de Hortalizas, Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina, Apartado 456, Lima, Peru.

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