Finca Marta | Cuba’s Agroecology Farm Leading by Example

Outside Havana, Finca Marta is pioneering agroecology by blending traditional knowledge with innovation.

Run by Dr. Fernando Funes, the farm produces organic food, restores ecosystems and builds community resilience.

🎬 Part of our short series ahead of Our Agroecology, Our Future. Premieres Oct 8 on: https://www.youtube.com/@caribbeanagroecology

TRANSCRIPT

Here at Finca Marta we practice agroecology: we improve the soil. We have a crop diversity. We use renewable energy. We recycle water. We protect plants and animals.

In Cuba, we have not been able to abandon the model of monocrop and extensive exploitation.

Agroecology has always been confined to small-scale, subsistence farming.

Finca Marta functions as an articulator or organizer of around one hundred farms, one hundred productive systems.

We will form a sustainable agrarian community that will have a social, cultural, productive, and ecological dynamic, where people can find a space to live in harmony in the countryside, satisfying their spiritual and material needs.

This is a place for all of us to practice and think about agroecology, to realize how much we can do, and not only within the boundaries of this 8 hectare farm, but also to continue demonstrating the potential of agroecology to transform Cuba’s countryside and global agriculture.

What agroecology contributed when there were no resources is forgotten when there are more resources, and when there are fewer resources, agroecology is used again to solve the problems.

And we have to understand once and for all that agroecology also needs resources to continue to progress, that farmers also need better living conditions.

Those farmers have proved time and again that they can respond to climate change scenarios. Droughts, hurricanes, frosts, and heavy rains.

I think agroecology is the key to definitely abandon monocropping and to incorporate farmers into a way of doing agriculture for life.

The greatest contribution we can make to Cuba’s and the world’s agri-food system is to demonstrate another way of coming together as a community to create ways of farming in harmony with society and the environment.