The Demonstration Farm

 The Demonstraiton Farm is located in Calca, Peru in the Sacred Valley of the Incas. The farm is run by the Andean Alliance for Sustainable Development (AASD), a registered non-profit organization. 

The farm is a space where AASD works with local farmers to fuse traditional and modern day growing practices to enable them to improve their food systems. The farm is a learning lab for training technicians in best growing practices and effective knowledge dissemination techniques. The space serves as a launchpad for community-based workshops with family greenhouse owners in the district of Lares where communities are located between 12,000-14,000ft in the Peruvian Andes.

The farm is a place where AASD holds workshops for trainers and subistence farmers alike. A centralized space such as the farm allows visiting farmers from the community to contribute their ideas to the experimentation process without experimenting directly in their fields, something that could potentially affect their limited food source. We have noticed that at the Demonstration Farm visiting farmers often begin to share tacit knowledge about traditional practices, such as pest prevention, when they see firsthand the various approaches we are experimenting with to address standard cultivation challenges.

With a learning lab such as the farm, our organization can effectively experiment with the best way to work with the farmers’ learning styles. We can create hands on, interactive workshops in which participants experience each process addressed in individual workshops all at once. Seeing the big picture during the learning process is crucial to the effectiveness of the workshop series. 

The AASD also has school greenhouse projects. Thus the experimentation at the farm siginificantly contributes to the content of school based trainings with students.