When your holidays become a learning experience!

We all go to school, to work or follow our daily routine. But for some days (or weeks) per year we don’t. We are on holiday. As tourists we lie on the beach, we climb mountains or stroll through a beautiful old town. However, my point is not that we like to, at least mentally, relax and step away from our daily life during our holidays, but that we are actually often learning many new things during holidays, learning through new experiences in a new environment.

Engage with tourists at the research site

Through a Mercator Foundation Course Support Grant from the World Food System Center we tried whether we could provide tourists new experiences that teach them something about sustainable food systems. We developed lesson plans for activities to conduct with tourists on the Aprisco research station in Spain, where the Agricultural Ecology Group of ETH Zurich conducts some of their intercropping experiments. The research station is located on a 150-ha farm dominated by an agrosilvopastoral production system, with free living livestock in a holm oak savanna. The farm also hosts a rural hotel for nature-loving tourists spending time watching birds in the neighbouring Monfragüe National Park during the day and stars during night.

Given this unique combination of agritourism and agroecological research on the farm, we wondered whether we could raise awareness among the international tourists of every age about the circularity of the food system on this farm, from research over production of vegetables and meat, over food processing and consumption to organic waste recycling that supports the production.

Even though the COVID-19 pandemic limited tourism, and therefore the opportunities to test the developed activities were less than we had hoped, we very much enjoyed the experiences we had. We were delighted to see how we could at the same time engage children aged one, children aged six and adults alike in the same topic, e.g. seeds. While the small kids dissected the large flowers of poppies in their own way to open the fruit and spread the many seeds around, the older kids separated wheat seeds from the chaff with sieves and the adults milled the seeds to fine flour. All together could then make a dough and bake a bread that did not only serve the families to satisfy their hunger, but also the staff at the research station who just took a break after finishing the stomatal conductance measurements on 34 varieties of wheat. They investigate the drought tolerance of different wheat varieties – an experiment which the research staff at the station introduced to the two families when they collected the poppies growing next to their experimental plots.

Christian Schöb explaining the morphology of a flower and the production of seeds to children. For demonstration purposes we used poppy, a common weed in the crop mixture experiments at Aprisco.

Scientific tourism to learn about sustainable food systems

Based on our first experience, scientific tourism is a great way of raising awareness not only about sustainable food systems, but also about research on sustainable food production and science in general. The many tourists that visit the experiments running on the farm are often surprised by how real and hands-on research can be, with some fancy tools – yes, but also with a lot of creativity when it comes to designing the right experiment for the research question and the simple handcraft to set the experiments up and collect the data. I think scientific tourism is a very good way to educate people on pressing challenges that affect our daily life, such as sustainable food. Beyond that, scientific tourism does also provide a face to science and scientists and raise awareness that science is not all about white lab coats and fancy prototypes, but also about real handcraft in nature.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christian Schöb is professor for Agricultural Ecology at ETH Zurich and member of the Asociación Aprisco. He studied plant ecology at the University of Bern and did a PhD on positive plant-plant interactions in alpine ecosystems. After further postdoc experience doing alpine ecology in Spain, he started to investigate such positive plant-plant interactions also in crop systems as a postdoc at the James Hutton Institute in the UK. Now his research is mainly dedicated to intercropping, the joint cultivation of different crops on the same piece of land in order to exploit beneficial interactions among plants.