EARTH’s banana plantation is a model for cooling climate change
Claudio Castro (‘10, Costa Rica) is the Euroclima project technician at the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and the European Union, who through his video series “Un día en la finca” (“A Day on the Farm”) seeks to amplify the voices of farmers on current environmental issues.
Recently the team visited the organic banana plantation at EARTH University to highlight it as both a model of sustainable agroforestry adaptable by food producers and a strategy for mitigating climate change’s effects while still being commercially profitable.
In the video, Roque Vaquero, professor of irrigation and drainage, and Arnoldo Ávila, manager of the organic production unit, explain how the system can safeguard against problems brought on by disease, rain, and extreme temperatures.
Regarding the reason behind the project, Castro said, “many theories about climate change and agriculture exist. There’s a lot of information, and we want to package it and all we know about applied sciences into an accessible and easy-to-understand format. It will be much easier for farmers to learn and for the information to be transmitted by way of testimonial than by an outsider arriving to tell them what to do.”
Watch the full video below (IN SPANISH):
To view the entire “A Day on the Farm” series, please visit IICA’s YouTube channel.
