Food from Earth: Sustainable Farming in Action

Abstract

With a lurch, the motorized banana tram starts moving slowly along its simple track carrying 100 banana bunches—cornucopias of green fruits, cloaked in blue plastic bags to protect them from insects and sun damage. A Costa Rican worker in a hard hat sits at the helm guiding the tram—nicknamed “the spider”—toward the packing plant a couple miles away. The tram driver and other workers harvested these bananas with machetes on the 813-acre banana plantation at EARTH University (Escuela de Agricultura de la Region Tropical Humeda) in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica.1 The banana is the world’s largest herbaceous flowering plant. Commercial bananas are sterile and are propagated by planting root stock from donor plants (the dark specks in the center of a banana are undeveloped ovules, the precursors to seeds). ... With its row upon row of genetically identical Cavendish banana plants stretching for acres, one might mistake EARTH’s plantation for a traditional banana farm. But through trial, error, and scientific research, EARTH University—funded largely by a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) endowment—has created a more ecologically friendly, lower-pesticide (but not organic) banana since the university was established in 1989. The university is also impacting the larger banana industry and nations around the world as alumni take sustainable agriculture initiatives and new business opportunities back to their home countries.