Iniciativa de Agroturismo COSSAO
About
The purpose of this initiative is to determine whether and how agritourism can improve quality of life, socioeconomic development, agricultural sustainability and resilience in the municipality of Utuado, Puerto Rico. For beginning farms this could mean laying the groundwork for sustainable agricultural production and operations for agritourism. For established farms this could mean developing value-added products and services.
We will be working with farmers to develop agritourism over a 3-year timeframe. Using a collaborative research approach, we will co-create approaches to develop, market and manage agritourism on local farms. We will track successes and challenges over time and help farmers find success by monitoring agritourism development on their farms and throughout the area.
In addition to these strategies for agritourism development and creation of value-added products and services, the project emphasizes outreach activities and co-creating educational materials to share the insights gained from the research project with other farmers. The second purpose of this project is to help build institutional and collaborative capacity in Utuado, so that problem solving in regards to agritourism and agricultural sustainability becomes more flexible, effective, participatory, inclusive and applicable.
This project combines resilience with sustainability. Building resilience in people, operations, and ecosystems means we invest in our adaptive capacities, we strengthen our abilities to stay safe during extreme events and to rebuild what has been damaged. Resilience is the ability of a system to absorb disturbance and to learn and adapt in times of turmoil in order to grow and become more dynamic. Sustainability is broadly defined as the capacity of a system to have adaptive capability and support opportunity and innovation. The combination of adaptability and innovation increases a system’s general capacities to absorb internal (e.g., social inequality, political turmoil) and external (e.g., global economic shifts, hurricanes) shocks. In other words, while resilience focuses on our ability to absorb shocks and adapt to difficult situations, sustainability strives for social equity, improving quality of life for everyone, and protecting our life support systems - the water we drink, the air we breathe, the soil we plant our foods and feed our animals.