Robbie Brown: ADE Intern


¡Hola! My name is Robbie Brown and I am a student at Covenant College. I am about to start my senior year as a Community Development (Com Dev) major, and this summer I have the privilege of serving as an intern with ADE. At Covenant every Com Dev major must complete a research internship between their Junior and Senior years. As I was preparing for my internship last year I mentioned to my advisor that I had recently become interested in agriculture and its integral place in the life of a community. In the Com Dev department at Covenant we emphasize the importance of holistic development, and to me agriculture is one of the fundamental building blocks of life in society. Without farms we don’t have food, and life without food is…well, you get the point.

You may be confused as to how I got connected with ADE when I was interested in agriculture. Yes, their main focus is education, but ADE sees agriculture as central to communities, especially communities in rural Costa Rica, and education must be holistic as well, and therefore include agriculture.

My primary goal here this summer is to help get the blackberry co-op off the ground. So far I have been working on the farm planting blackberries, constructing a pigpen made out of dirt (it’s pretty cool), and setting up a biodigester. Furthermore, I hope to begin researching for the blackberry co-op in the next week. I hope to interact with the eight members of the co-op to find out how their blackberries are coming along, and what we can be doing to move the co-op forward together.

As I am about half way through my time here this summer, I can already say that it has been an incredible opportunity. I have gotten to see and experience Costa Rica in a very unique manner, I have gotten my hands dirty and done good ol’ fashioned farm work, and I have learned so much about doing Com Dev work in the field. It has been a blessing to work alongside the members of ADE and to see the things I’ve spent the last three years learning about being put into action.

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