Sustainable Gardening in Brazil [Research Stories]

This post is written by Honors student and UHP SURE Award winner Haley Burns.

I used the SURE Award to help fund my research on sustainable agriculture feasibility while in Brazil.
As part of my research, I lived in a tent on a property where a man is attempting to build a house using only the resources he has on the property. His goal is to have a self-sustaining garden, with a permaculture design – meaning the garden beds are made from places that are already there so that the landscape is not changed too much. I helped create a couple of the garden beds, separate seeds from dried plants, start and water seedlings, and plant pumpkin plants.

The land is situated close to the park Chapada Diamantina, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful places on earth. The views every day were stunning! Because of the heat, we only worked in the mornings. There were no showers or electricity, so we bathed in the nearby river, and had only one lightbulb from a single, tiny solar panel.
In conclusion, the work on sustainable projects, even this tiny, is incredibly difficult and energy draining. To bring this to largescale agriculture on such and extreme level of sustainability would be nearly impossible. The takeaway, though, is that we could apply some of the methods on a large scale without being extreme. Compost, permaculture, and seed collection could all be implemented in larger conventional farms to make the system a little better for the world.