NMBU students on a field course in Tanzania share their experiences of 'in situ' learning.
Agricultural excellence
Sokoine University of Agriculture is a centre of agricultural excellence located in Morogoro, nestled at the foot of the Uluguru Mountains. Known as Tanzania’s leading agricultural university, SUA hosts thousands of students pursuing studies in agriculture, forestry, veterinary sciences, natural resource management, and agribusiness. The campus is vast and green, with teaching farms, experimental plots, and forest reserves integrated into its landscape.
During our stay, most of us lived in private bedrooms with shared bathrooms in a hostel on campus. The hostel cafeteria served us daily breakfasts and lunches: steaming chapatis, beans, rice, and occasional fresh passion fruit juice. Just outside, street vendors sold roasted groundnuts and fresh mangoes, adding bursts of local flavour to our routines.
Planting crops in layers
A highlight of our stay was a visit to Apopo’s syntropic agroforestry site. Syntropic farming mimics natural forests by layering crops: tall trees provide shade, mid-sized plants thrive beneath, and smaller ground crops flourish below. This approach maximises space, improves biodiversity, and reduces pests and diseases without relying on external inputs. Instead of struggling against nature, farmers design food forests that work in harmony, ensuring continuous harvests throughout the year.
In a natural forest, different plants occupy specific spaces based on their sunlight needs. Syntropic agroforestry follows this wisdom by planting in layers - tall trees provide shade, mid-sized crops thrive beneath them, and smaller plants flourish at ground level. This method maximizes space, boosts biodiversity, and reduces the risk of pests and disease outbreaks. Instead of struggling against nature, farmers design food forests that work in harmony, ensuring continuous harvests throughout the year (source: Apopo's 5 pillars of syntropic agroforestry).
At SUA, horticulture students plant, monitor, and harvest various fruits. We tasted fresh star fruit – incredibly sour but refreshing – and sweet pomelo fruit. Seeing macadamia nuts freshly harvested was new for many of us. We also explored different tree species planted for agroforestry and commercial purposes on campus.
The NORPART-EAT conference brought together groups presenting on diverse agricultural topics such as knowledge-sharing on seed systems; agrobiodivesity, climate change adaptation (how farmers in Luale adapt to changes of rainfall); and extension services and co-creation of farming knowledge. All of the presentations included practical solutions rooted in local realities. Hot lunch was served – a welcome recharge between intense discussions.
Creating resilient food systems together
Living at SUA taught us that agriculture is not just about crops and yields. It is about people, cultures, knowledge, and how they intersect with nature. The NORPART-EAT conference strengthened our beliefs in collaboration, both within communities and across borders, to create resilient food systems in a changing climate.
Students spend four weeks in Tanzania as part of the course Environment, Development and Climate Change in Tanzania offered by the Department of International Environment and Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.