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A 2007 donation from USAID’s American Hospitals and Schools Abroad (ASHA) program created EARTH’s dairy plant. It is a place that encourages experiential learning and produces the best quality dairy products for the university’s internal consumption.

As executive director of EARTH Futures, Emily Fintel Kaiser works each and every day studying and upscaling solutions that improve agricultural sustainability and life quality in rural areas. In this eye-opening interview, she explains how EARTH Futures is magnifying the University’s impact.

Our Class of 2021 recently returned from 15-week professional internships around the world. Fourth-year students Zakeyu Tawonga (Malawi), Ana Marian González (Nicaragua), and Usman Mohammed (Nigeria) feel inspired to get to work in their home countries after transformative experiences in Malawi, Brazil, and the USA.

Since 2007, the United Nations declared that every October 15 is a day to remember the essential role of rural women. The day honors women who farm, take care of their homes, and fight for their communities’ food security. Besides all this, they face daily challenges where they must do everything possible to achieve inclusion, eradicate poverty, and empower and educate themselves in a world that has often closed doors to them…

Ana Giselle Muñoz is an entrepreneur from Río Montaña, an isolated community where fertile land abounds. She and her family participate in an innovative project – led by EARTH Futures and the CRUSA Foundation – that increases agricultural efficiency, widens market access, and enhances life quality for corn farmers in Guanacaste, Costa Rica…

“Corn, as a basic ingredient, comes with many stories. The legend says that the Chorotega people come from maize kernels and that an indigenous woman running through the middle of the cornfield was pricked by a thorn, and drops of her blood fell on the crop, thus painting the maize in different colors.”

To build a house, one must first clear the land, dig the necessary holes and ditches, and lay the foundation. Then, the floor is installed, the walls are raised, and the roof is added. Esmeralda Chaves, with her own two hands, built the house in which she lives. She did it all by herself out of necessity – but also out of an understanding that anything is possible when you are driven to achieve it…

During the pandemic, our La Flor Campus has been bustling with new projects, thanks to collaborations between EARTH and small sugarcane, hay, and cattle businesses of Guanacaste, Costa Rica.

Our educational curriculum, teaching tools, and academic spaces are continually updated to ensure students and faculty are prepared to tackle global challenges. Our Center for Geomatics and Remote Detection is making this possible by collaborating on innovative research projects with AgritecGEO and Agricenter Life-Rid.