Educational marketplace of an agricultural school, EFASC

             I am a monitor of the Agricultural Family School of Santa Cruz-RS, Brazil. We work with about 120 communities in rural areas; the vast majority of the families live of Tobacco monoculture, which is a massive agricultural production, whereby families produce tobacco on a large scale, often forgetting the main production, of food products. AFSSC surged from this context and aims to encourage diversification of production.

The community where AFSSC operates, knows that we receive the sons and daughters of farmers, and knowing this, they sought us, showing interest in purchasing food produced by the farmers themselves. A process started of thinking of an alternative that could meet this need and put the students in direct contact with the consumers, strengthening the links between both, so that consumers would know the origin of the food consumed.

This initiative also aims at helping young people to organize the trade of its produce in an educational way, thereby completing the training cycle proposed by our methodology, conducting monitoring from production up to the sale of the food products. The idea is to bring family farming closer to the community, with students and graduates bringing surplus production into the school to trade with the community.

Thus "The AFSSC Educational Fair" emerged in 2013, as an essential proposal for our families to realize that more and more diversification is possible. AFSSC is changing paradigms in the field and encouraging ecological production among students, as more and more people are valuing food products without pesticides.