Terrace agriculture, diversity, and soil health at high elevation

Contributed by Dr. Maheteme Gebremedhin, chair, School of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Kentucky State University

The first lesson the Andes teaches is simple: pace your breath. At high elevation, every step feels earned, and every farming decision carries weight. As a soil scientist, I came to Peru expecting remarkable landscapes. I did not expect those landscapes to reframe, so quickly and so clearly, what “soil health” and “resilience” look like when they are inseparable from daily survival.

In December 2025, I joined Kentucky State University students and colleagues for an international experiential learning visit supported by USDA NextGen. We moved across Andean highlands and coastal agricultural zones where topography, wind, and water scarcity shape the logic of farming. The itinerary included field-based learning, academic exchanges, and community engagement, but the most enduring value for me came from a more basic encounter: standing on mountainsides engineered for agriculture and realizing the land itself is a living textbook.

In my courses, we teach soil as a system shaped by time, organisms, climate, parent material, and topography. In Peru, that framework felt less like theory and more like a way to read the landscape in real time. Terraced hillsides, stone walls, and carefully guided water channels were everywhere, clear evidence of deliberate design meant to hold soil in place, slow runoff, and protect thin, precious ground from being carried away. The terraces were more than impressive engineering. They functioned as living systems, with microclimates built with stone, crop diversity arranged with purpose, and water managed with an efficiency that comes from long experience under constraint.

One cold morning in the Cusco region, our group stood above a patchwork of terraced fields carved into steep mountainsides. From a distance, the terraces looked like architecture. Up close, they read like conservation practice: erosion reduced by design, moisture held long enough for crops to establish, and soils protected season after season. The climb itself became part of the lesson. Thin air, shifting wind, and exposed slopes made it clear that “high elevation” is not a detail; it is a force that shapes people, plants, and microbial life.

That same day, I watched classroom learning click into place. A student who had taken AFE 334 Soil Science crouched near a terrace edge, worked soil through their fingers, traced where water would move in a heavy rain, and compared sections protected by vegetation with areas more exposed to rill formation. The observations were practical and immediate, with structure, texture, color, drainage, and erosion risk assessed without a lab instrument in sight. The larger point was even clearer: sustainable land management is not a diagram on paper. In the Andes, resilience is practiced because there is no alternative.

As we moved between smallholder and Indigenous farming communities, the experience became a sustained encounter with farmer-led innovation and traditional ecological knowledge. Diversified cropping came into focus not only as a market strategy, but as a biological buffer against climate variability. Agrobiodiversity was not an abstract concept. It was an adaptive framework: multiple crops, multiple planting windows, and multiple pathways for stability when weather becomes unpredictable.

A moment I will carry for a long time happened beside a field boundary, where stone placement, contour alignment, and crop choice showed their cumulative impact. A student asked, “How do they decide what to plant where?” The farmer’s response was grounded and direct: plant where the soil and water will support it, and diversify to avoid total loss. That exchange captured what we hoped the experience would accomplish by connecting soil–landscape interactions to real-world resilience, and by reinforcing that science advances fastest when it respects local context.

The lessons also shifted with the landscape. After focusing on erosion and terrace stability in the mountains, our attention turned to water-use efficiency, nutrient management under limited inputs, and risks like salinity and compaction where irrigation becomes a lifeline. Watching Kentucky State students translate concepts across environments was one of the most rewarding parts of the visit. Curiosity became applied problem-solving that was careful, grounded, and increasingly precise.

The trip underscored something that matters deeply in land-grant work: communities sustain agriculture not only through technique, but through values. We learned how gratitude to Mother Earth is woven into daily practice, and how land is approached as sacred rather than treated only as a production unit. For our group, that meant practicing respect by listening carefully, learning deliberately, and recognizing that cultural understanding is not separate from agricultural understanding.

For the School of Agriculture and Natural Resources and for Kentucky State, experiences like Peru sharpen what it means to be a globally engaged land-grant institution. Global engagement is not travel for its own sake. It is knowledge exchange that involves learning from communities that have sustained productive agriculture under high risk and bringing those lessons back to Kentucky in ways that advance equity, resilience, and applied science.

As I reflect on the visit, I see a bridge into the work ahead. In 2026, I want to help expand high-impact experiential learning, whether international, on-farm, or community-based, so that more courses routinely connect classroom theory to field realities. Peru also reinforced the promise of comparative agroecosystem research, including opportunities to build international pipelines around soil health indicators, biodiversity-based farming, and climate adaptation. Extension remains central, too. The most compelling lessons were embedded in communities, and they point toward decision tools, accessible workshops, and demonstration learning that respects farmers’ time, budgets, and priorities.

Peru gave our students a deeper understanding of how land, water, and people shape agriculture. It gave our faculty new research pathways. It also gave me renewed clarity: durable progress comes from combining scientific rigor with field experience, cultural competence, and genuine partnership.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the support that made this experience possible through USDA Award No. 2023-70440-40145. I also thank the local hosts and organizers who welcomed our group and helped ensure a meaningful visit, and I appreciate the leadership and collaboration of Dr. Buddhi Gyawali, professor of geospatial applications, human dimensions and climate studies, and Dr. Paloma Pinillos, international and community partnerships administrator in the Office of Global Strategies and International Affairs, throughout the program.