Rooted Magazine presents seven vibrant stories proving agroecology is life taught everywhere; classrooms, kitchens, fields, streets and villages. Meet Australian high‑schoolers at a farm school who plant, harvest, nurture and cook their way through their curriculum; Cambodian students, many with little prior exposure, fully immersing themselves into agroecology; Green School Clubs in Ghana sparking community action; Italian classrooms building agroecological eco‑literacy; Malawian teachers transforming barren school grounds into permaculture plots and food forests; Mexican students composing soundscapes to listen to the everyday and the invisible; and Ugandans reconnecting through intergenerational knowledge‑sharing at cultural events. These initiatives show forms of agroecology learning that taste, smell, listens and grow.
Story 1: Australia
Farm My School trains the next generation in Australia
What began as a revolutionary idea for Farm My School – to turn underutilised land on school campuses into regenerative farms – is now a proven model at the Bellarine Secondary College in the town of Drysdale in Victoria, Australia. The farm has become more than a garden – it’s a working food system, training ground and community hub.
High school students at the farm school plant, harvest, nurture and cook their way through the curriculum that connects science, wellbeing, the arts and sustainability in a living classroom. The community is also involved: local families access fresh, seasonal produce through weekly veggie boxes, and attend workshops facilitated by chefs to learn practical skills for preparing healthy and nourishing meals.
Farm My School also offers an Incubator Programme that provides paid farm traineeships for selected students with an interest in horticulture and regenerative farming. This shows that schools can become dynamic centres for workforce development and for producing the next generation of food system leaders.
“It’s peaceful on the farm,” says current trainee Alex, 18, who credits the programme for helping him find direction. “You just hear the birds and not much else.” “Because I am dyslexic, learning in a classroom was hard,” says Charlee, 19. “The traineeship has helped me learn in new ways, and to stay in school.” Paul, 19, adds: “This opportunity has improved my life both mentally and physically.”
Following the success of its pilot program, Farm My School has expanded to a second site in the nearby town of Colac. This is only the start – our long-term vision is to see farms embedded across Australia and even internationally!
Author: Jacqui Taylor is the Marketing & Communications Manager at Farm My School, a not-for-profit organisation that collaborates with schools to transform their underutilised grounds into agroecological farms. Contact:hello@farmmyschool.com.au
Story 2: Cambodia
Integrating technology with tradition in Cambodia
Under the slogan ‘Nurture the Earth, Empower the Youth’, our one-year agroecology curriculum in 2025 engaged 80 rural high-school students from two provinces in northwest Cambodia. The students – many of whom had limited prior exposure to agroecology – were given a truly immersive learning experience that ranged from building soil health to stimulating biodiversity.
An important goal of the programme was to demonstrate how technical solutions can work together with traditional Khmer ecological practices, such as the use of wild plants for food, traditional medicine and natural pesticides.
The hub for the programme was the inspiring AgriTech Centre located at the award-winning Eco Farm, and students took part in monthly training sessions, field trips and local exchange visits. In the final four months of the project, they received small seed funds to set up and monitor agroecology business ideas of their own. Projects included mushroom growing and vegetable production on school grounds for nearby restaurants. In the words of one student, “It’s essential to show young people that agriculture matters — and that they have a meaningful role to play in it.”
Following one full year of curriculum implementation, we leveraged its content to develop an agroecology board game called Seeds of Change. The game provides a practical, simulated experience of agroecological decision making and challenges students to work through real-life scenarios.
One of these situations arose at the end of 2025, when a military conflict along the Cambodian/Thai border forced people in the area surrounding the AgriTech Centre to relocate into evacuation camps. Since the families started returning home after the January 2026 ceasefire, Green Shoots has been partnering with young farmers on a humanitarian response to incorporate agroecological solutions.
For example, we are introducing agroecological practices for chicken raising together. As inspiration, we are using the AgriTech Centre’s mascot – the ‘permaculture chicken’ – which represents the concept of a chicken as the central point for all integrated farming activities: aerating the soil, providing healthy manure for compost, and natural pest control. In 2026, by working with young farmers and local high schools, we plan to demonstrate this practice in the field.
Author: Muneezay Jaffery is Operations Manager at Green Shoots Foundation, which supports community-led programmes that weave together economic empowerment, food and agriculture, education and community support. Contact: muneezay@greenshootsfoundation.org
Story 3: Ghana
Co-creating climate solutions in Ghana’s green school clubs
Across Ghana’s dryland districts, farmers and families face deepening climate uncertainty. Rainfall is no longer predictable, topsoil is rapidly losing fertility, and traditional cropping cycles are breaking down. Within this landscape, we launched Green School Clubs at three locations in the Central Gonja District in 2023.
Pupils and teachers cultivated gardens with seedlings and compost, co-designed modules on tree planting, and led climate awareness sessions using participatory learning tools. In 2025, this model was replicated in three schools in the Nabdam District.
We saw how learning shifted from theory to lived experience when students and teachers designed and managed their own gardens. And when teachers and students co-designed experiments with local farmers, they produced low-cost, locally relevant, climate adaptive solutions – from recycled compost bins to seed preservation methods.
Pupils became caretakers of their environment. In both Central Gonja and Nabdam, we noticed that families began adopting the climate-friendly and sustainable practices introduced by their children. Building on these experiences, we plan to scale the Green School Clubs model to include five additional districts.
Schools still face material barriers such as water scarcity, lack of irrigation, land insecurity and poor fencing – reminders that resilience also depends on supportive infrastructure and institutional backing. Yet we are heartened to see that transformation in rural education to focus on adapting to climate uncertainty will thrive if it is rooted in participation, ownership and co-creation.
Authors: Esther Nyamekye Opoku, David Adjei and Priscilla Sedinam Akoto work with the FIDEP Foundation in Kumasi, Ghana, with a focus on climate resilience, environmental governance and inclusive development. Contact: hello.fidep@gmail.com
Story 4: Italy
Agroecological eco-literacy as a pathway to youth-led land stewardship in Italy
The rural area around Italy’s Lake Bracciano is under severe ecological stress. In this context, schools have created space for co-designed agroecology programmes with and for youth over the past five years.
In 2017, much of the volcanic lake’s water was drained and diverted to Rome, leaving a vulnerable ecosystem that has yet to recover. The area’s monoculture fields put additional pressure on water supplies, while climate change and drought continue to intensify. For young people here, staying on the land is not a viable choice, and many move to cities to pursue higher education and employment.
In an effort to turn the tide, Navdanya International is bringing non-formal agroecology instruments to the community through formal channels like high schools and middle schools. Our programmes are a mixture of theoretical and practical: trainings on agroecology linked to the territory, tracing local food chains, and the launching of participatory processes that restore agency to young people. We offer general ecoliteracy programmes that rotate between classrooms, forests and farms.
The programme is guided by young experts and co-designed by the participants. Young people are connected with local agroecological farmers, grassroots organisations, actors in local markets, and various institutions. Political analysis and advocacy training leverages grassroots work into skills that will enable participants to take part in decision-making procedures from the local to the international level.
In our experience, this kind of place-based ecoliteracy is key to the transition towards ecological and just food systems. Our bottom-up, collaborative approach has resulted in new generations of young people in action, transforming their communities and food systems from within. We have learned that agroecology is much more than a set of techniques: it is a pathway of emancipation and belonging that allows young people to reconnect to their territories.
Author: Mateja Lara Schmidt is an educator and facilitator with Navdanya International, a non-profit organisation that enables just and resilient food systems through the collective stewardship of biodiversity and the sovereignty of the commons. Contact: mateja.schmidt@navdanyainternational.org
Story 5: Malawi
Flipping the narrative in Malawi’s schools
Malawians with rural backgrounds often view agriculture as a last resort. This is due to high poverty levels in rural areas, a lack of prestige associated with farming, and the widespread belief that real success can only be found in urban jobs. Our work with permaculture education at schools has helped to flip this narrative for many young people, allowing them to see themselves not as mere labourers but as knowledge brokers for their communities.
The Schools and Colleges Permaculture Programme (SCOPE) transforms the barren grounds around classrooms into permaculture demonstration plots and productive food forests. Students practice crop diversification, produce their own biofertilisers from local materials such as bran, ash, animal droppings and carbonised crop residues, and manage water-harvesting systems. Schools are becoming living laboratories for agroecology.
School meals are sourced from these gardens, providing improved nutrition and tangible economic benefits. In some communities, we have succeeded in reducing the ‘lean period’ – when children go to school hungry and dropout rates are high – from an average of six months per year to three or four months.
Our strategy is not just to teach, but to empower young agroecology practitioners with hands-on learning that fosters a sense of agency. For example, young farmers are now selling a diversity of crops such as maize, sorghum, millets, beans and other local crops at local markets instead of depending on monocultures. The agroecological approach that students bring home has also catalysed a powerful intergenerational learning process. For example, young people are convincing their families to preserve the indigenous seeds their elders once cherished but later abandoned for so-called ‘improved’ hybrids.
Our work in school communities has led to the local production of inputs, ensuring that money stays within the community, and has encouraged diversification across the entire value chain. Beyond crop production, communities are engaging in post-harvest handling and value addition producing products such as jams and juices. The diversification extends further into livestock production, beekeeping, and fish farming, creating multiple income streams and strengthening local resilience.
To date, we have seen tangible positive outcomes in over 50 Malawian school communities across 14 districts, and we are planning to scale this model as we cultivate the next generation of food sovereignty leaders.
Author: Jazzakah Mapasa is an agroecology practitioner and programmes officer at SCOPE Malawi. Contact: jazzakah@scopemalawi.com
Story 6: Mexico
Listening to the territory: Agroecological training through soundscapes
In 2023, 24 postgraduate university students recorded soundscapes in Mexico’s Jalisco and Nayarit territories: kitchens, gardens, chickens, trains, paths through cornfields, children’s voices, songs, crickets, and the wind in the branches. More than simply recording sounds, the exercise proposed a way of attentively listening to the everyday and the invisible, that which also sustains life in the agroecological sphere.
The goals for the students were to understand and recognise the agroecological environment, to strengthen a collective identity, and to give back what they had learned. The recordings not only documented the environment but also awakened shared memories, feelings, and imaginings: “I imagined the smell of the wet earth… just the music of nature” (Jorge C.); and “I even got hungry when I heard the sound of the stove!” (Judith M.).
In this way, the experience fostered a sensitive and situated pedagogy. By listening to and discussing each other’s audio recordings, memories were activated, landscapes were evoked (“I imagined myself in the jungle!”), and the narrative potential of sounds to “tell stories and… care for our beautiful planet” was recognised (María de L.). Communal listening strengthened community bonds and opened new ways of narrating and sharing agroecology in everyday life.
This experience suggests that listening – lovingly, collectively and territorially – can become a powerful pedagogical tool in agroecological education. We recommend that such active listening exercises be incorporated into education that seeks to connect sensory knowledge, narrative practices and community communication. Listening to the land not only allows us to recognise its soundscapes but also to cultivate shared horizons from which to build deeply rooted food sovereignty.
Author: Amparo Albalat Botana is a scholar and lecturer trained in biology and rural development at Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, Mexico. Her work brings together agroecology, feminisms and political ecology. Contact: amparoalbalat@hotmail.com
This text compiles a dialogue between students from the Specialisation in Food Sovereignty and Strategic Management of Local Impact (PIES ÁGILES) programme of the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation in Mexico. The soundscapes are in the process of being prepared for the PIES ÁGILES YouTube channel.
Story 7: Uganda
Intergenerational collaboration for agroecology in Uganda
To explore the transformative power of intergenerational knowledge sharing in advancing agroecological farming in Uganda, we create community spaces and cultural events where elders and youth come together to exchange skills and stories about food culture and agroecology.
For example, during our ‘Ask Jajja’ gatherings youth are invited to ask a local ‘Jajja’ – Luganda for grandparent – any questions they might have about food, soil, power, sovereignty, sustainability, culture or identity. These sessions allow elders to pass down ancestral wisdom about farming and beyond, while in turn youth use rhythm and colour to communicate their lessons and reflections in the form of poems, songs, dances and short plays.
We have found that the most effective strategy in making agroecology more accessible and appealing to young people has been ensuring that activities are co-led by young people and elders. This awakens mutual respect: elders feel valued for their knowledge, while youth gain practical skills and the confidence to lead.
Intergenerational collaboration also teaches young people that the transformation of food systems requires a transformation in how they see themselves – not simply as consumers, but as producers. For example, the ‘Ask Jajja’ dialogues culminated in a seed goat project for a group of 20 young women in Nwoya District. These girls were provided with goats, which in turn supply dung for gardens and food or income for their caretakers when the animals are eventually eaten or sold.
The Luganda proverb Emiti emito gyegigumiza ekibira translates as “The young trees are the future of the forest”. These exchanges with older smallholder farmers have empowered youth to become active agents on food justice and to reclaim their roles as custodians of local knowledge.
Author: Sarah Nakame is the founder and Chief Inspiration Officer of Audacious Africa, an Ugandan-based NGO. Contact: audaciousafrica1@gmail.com
These articles are part of Issue 4-2026: Youth leading the way in agroecology.
