A Farm's-eye View of Sustainability

            Last week Professor David Unander of Eastern University joined us in Belize to teach about sustainable community development. It was a farm-filled week as students learned about the agricultural side of development, and we toured several farms in our area that are moving towards their own unique visions of sustainability.

            We began by visiting the farm of a local friend, Santiago. There he shared some of his insights on what it takes to make something sustainable, and showed us what his farm is doing to achieve this. We were able to see how he worked with nature instead of against it, and got a look at some new crops he is experimenting with.

Staff member Gellie tries a bite of Moringa with Curtis.

            Next we visited the organic Maya Farm of Chaa Creek. Here we met the local workers and saw the fruit of their experiments with composting, vermiculture, and other organic farming techniques. They even showed us their ‘goatel’ (goat hotel), the raised stables they keep their goats in, and let us pet the 6 week old kids.

Dana pets baby goats in the 'goatel.'

            Finally we ended our tour of local farms at Central Farm, a Taiwanese funded Development project of the Belize Government. Here we saw first-hand how they experiment with new farming techniques, find new uses for waste and rejected crops, and equip local Belizeans with free lessons and technology to put these ideas into practice. We were blown away with their generosity, and even received free dried fruit, pineapple cakes, and delicious pitahaya (dragon fruit)!

We all eagerly received our pink, flame-shaped pitahayas.

The sweet, juicy insides of this dragon fruit tasted about as good as it looked!  

            It was certainly a week to remember, and a great way to get ourselves thinking about sustainable development as our students head off to their own internships next week.