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The first term of the Terrae Vivae program saw the participation of students from the Salvo D’Acquisto Agricultural Technical Institute in Bracciano. An important milestone for the program, considering that Navdanya’s educators are working, for the first time after two years of experience with high school TSOP programs, with an agricultural technical institute. Future professionals to whom we aim to offer in-depth knowledge of agroecological techniques that, through their consultancy, may one day be adopted by an increasing number of farmers.

To help participants understand that what they are learning has immediate practical application, an experiential approach was chosen. In continuity with Navdanya’s educational philosophy, learning was not conceived as a simple transmission of notions, but as a living process that starts from direct experience and contact with the land. The risk that classroom reasoning becomes empty words is high, and so, as much as possible, away with blackboards and presentations. Field visits to farms, technical worksheets, the spade test. And above all, no barrier between students and nature. The soil thus becomes an open-air classroom: a space to observe, touch, smell, compare different samples, raise questions, and connect what is seen in the field with the technical topics covered in class.

The work was structured as a participatory workshop, alternating between field investigations, group discussions, and collective sharing, so that students—future agricultural professionals—could engage their own perspectives, knowledge, and experience. This approach, based on «learning by doing» and peer exchange, aims to transform abstract concepts such as fertility, biodiversity, or regeneration into real practices, linked to specific places, people, and decisions. Throughout the process, students were guided to identify the challenges they see in today’s agriculture and to reflect on what it means to farm regeneratively. It is in this way that it finally becomes possible to look at soil with new eyes and recognize agroecology as a concrete possibility, not just an abstract concept.

In one of the activities, participants were divided into groups, distributed across different points in a field, pasture, or woodland, free to explore, investigate, and improvise. With the supervision of educators, initial curiosity transformed into visual, sensory, and olfactory observation. Students were able to observe and analyze differences between soil layers based on color, moisture, smell, and texture. Some encountered earthworms, others found fungi, and others analyzed humus. It is in this phase that it becomes possible to identify the differences between living, healthy soil and barren land in an advanced stage of desertification. This is the condition of 75% of agricultural soils in Southern Europe, with organic carbon concentrations below 2% and therefore at high risk of desertification. Visits to farms allow for direct experience of techniques that can not only protect, but also regenerate soil fertility. Students were thus able to observe the regeneration of soil organic matter up to 6% through the use of rotational grazing.

To fully understand the importance that agroecological techniques can have, a technical consultancy simulation was set up. Students, as future agricultural technicians, were asked to conduct a logic exercise, a technical analysis aimed at emancipating them from conventional thinking and stimulating ecological reasoning.

At the end of the program, a technical committee simulation was proposed: a farmer, from various production sectors, presents their farm and the problems they face in terms of production, management, and finances. On the desk, a series of information sheets on key agroecological techniques. In this way, after analyzing the issues, students can consult the sheets, develop their reasoning, and propose ecological solutions to the farmer.

The exercise made it possible to give context to the practices, but above all to stimulate critical thinking. The result was that many groups found multiple solutions to individual problems, implicitly bringing reasoning to a complex and systemic level, moving away from a conventional reductionist approach. Learning to recognize living soil also means beginning to imagine different forms of agriculture and community: it is from here that another idea of the future can germinate.