MAlt Trip: Guadalajara, Mexico
Middlebury students traveled to Guadalajara, Mexico, for a second consecutive year to learn about organic agriculture and sustainable land management while working with La Asociación Comunitaria de Autosuficiencia (ACA).
ACA, a non-profit organization, works to promote sustainable, organic farming practices to farmers in the local community through education, outreach, and technique modeling. Students spent most of their time at ACA’s Eco Center, a five-acre organic farm where students spent time in the fields weeding, harvesting, and planting.
In the words of trip leaders Kevin Redmon and Sasha Swerdloff: “Our proudest accomplishment was clearing one seriously gnarly section of sweet potatoes overgrown entirely by weeds; it opened our eyes to just how labor intensive organic agriculture truly is.”
In addition to physical labor in the fields, students helped host an educational Eco Center open-house that featured stations on water management, compost, and herb identification. By the end of the trip, leaders and participants felt satisfied with the impact that they had made, both on the farm and on the community members with whom they had worked. At the same time, the experience generated hours of discussion, especially about the challenges of running a service-based non-profit in the developing world.
