Pura Vida

As a career student that once upon a last year co-taught a college level course, I really appreciate novel techniques to communicate ideas. Let’s face it, the blah, blah, blah lecture approach often leads to bobbing head syndrome and little content retention. But after being on the farm grand stand, I’m not sure anyone will forget the lessons we learned about organic certification and transgenic crops!

With your character determined by the hat you choose, Mike and I were Oosda representatives. In the first skit, Oosda (USDA), the United States Department of Agriculture, visits Roberts’s farm to decide if he can obtain an organic certification for his crops. With witty jokes from young farm-boy Robert to his Ma about needing a pool for the “organic seal,” and not knowing that manure is fertilizer, Robert communicated this important observation: think for a moment about how agriculture first evolved. We observed what occurs in nature and did our best to imitate and enhance that process. Yet for some reason when we refer to agriculture today we call “conventional” farming those systems that use pesticides, making organic farming the alternative. Why should farms that do things naturally have to pay for a certification, and why should natural organic farming be considered the alternative and not the convention?

In the second skit two individuals from Mount Santos come to the farm. At first, Robert the farm-boy was very confused as to why representatives from the Church of Mount Santos (Montsanto Corporation) would be interested in the jeans that blew in to the farm during the windstorm. He hadn’t asked for the jeans, but when they landed here he assumed they were his and gave them to his brothers and sisters. Another great play on words, this skit articulated the concern about genes from transgenic plants making their way into farmers fields via pollen, and the legal battle that has followed. If genes blow in from Montsanto plants, should the local grower be forced to pay the corporation for use of their product? Should they be forced to cut down their crop if they do not pay?