ABSTRACT
At sunrise in the Colombian eastern lowlands, students in orange and blue jumpsuits twist vines of maracuyá and gather to unearth yucca while passing around a thermos of coffee. They come from far-flung towns and villages in departments afflicted by the country's socio-political conflict, where they could have been recruited by local armed groups. They are at Utopía, an agricultural engineering campus managed by Lasallian priests studying sustainable and economically viable cultivation methods that they must implement in their home communities upon graduation as a condition of their scholarship. This chapter traces the deep roots of programs like this in the history of Colombia's rural agricultural schools. It focuses on three projects in northern Valle del Cauca in the 1930s to explore the long-term history of agricultural education programs and curricula in the country as part of broader transnational movements. By examining how state-led agricultural experimentation and education worked, the chapter argues that rural Colombians had been linked to internationally circulating ideas and forms of resistance against the growth of large-scale industrial agriculture for a long time and helps explain the country's emergence in the 1950s as an important epicenter in Latin America of the global Green Revolution.
