Félix Revilla SJ, Pedro Piedras and José Ignacio García SJ, PI 3 /2024

This article, “Betting on Agroecology as a Way of Agricultural Production and Establishing Social Relations” is a collaborative piece of three professors from the Universidad Pontificia Comillas’s School of Agricultural Engineering. They have been directly engaged in agricultural education and production for several decades then shifted from promoting the “technocratic or industrial paradigm” of agriculture to agroecology. Promotio Iustitiae asked how they have become so impassioned about agroecology. Their experience of fruitful collaboration between the University and Valladolid City residents was a turning point. Here is their reply: “The choice for agroecology in the whole of INEA (School of Agricultural Engineering) was intuitive at the beginning. At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, the growing societal concern was on sustainable agriculture and the reduction of [negative] impacts on the environment. It was our school farm’s organic vegetable gardens developed with, and for, Valladolid City’s 430 elderly residents that launched us into concrete actions: we transformed the school’s curriculum and the way we cultivated our farm and we joined social and consumer initiatives (organic production cooperative, the Ana Leal House of Ecology and Welcome, etc.). All of this we did with the full collaboration of teachers and teams… Sometimes conversion is a process and in our case, we continue to move forward steadfastly.”