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Schedule a meeting now! Get advice from our admission expert Katharina. Request a spot in our meeting hub and we will call you back!
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Schedule a meeting now! Get advice from our admission expert Katharina. Request a spot in our meeting hub and we will call you back!
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Upskill Study summer course field lecture report
Learning Sustainable Agriculture in Bali: From Jatiluwih Rice Terraces to an Organic Farm
3-5 minutes reading
What does sustainable agriculture actually look like when it moves beyond the classroom?
For students studying sustainability in Bali, the answer can be found in irrigation channels running between rice terraces, farmers working collectively, microorganisms beneath the soil, medicinal plants growing beside a house, and even coffee beans roasted by hand. This August, students from the upskill Sustainable Development and Ecotourism Summer Course at Udayana University, joined Professor Dr. Ni Luh Suriani for a field lecture connecting two learning environments: the rice terraces of Jatiluwih and Dewandaru Organic Farm. The day explored sustainable agriculture not simply as food production, but as a system connecting culture, biodiversity, rural livelihoods, tourism, and human wellbeing.
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Jatiluwih offered students a living example of Bali’s traditional Subak irrigation system, where shared water management, community cooperation, agriculture, and Tri Hita Karana come together. The visit explored how preserving this agricultural landscape can support both sustainable development and responsible ecotourism.
Jatiluwih: Agriculture, Culture, and CommunityBased Learning in Business Education?
The day began early, with the group traveling north toward Jatiluwih, where Professor Suriani led the students through the rice terraces. The landscape provided a practical introduction to one of the central themes of her sustainable agriculture teaching: Subak.
Subak is more than an irrigation technique. It is a traditional Balinese agricultural organization through which farmers collectively manage water and agricultural responsibilities. Professor Suriani connects the system with Tri Hita Karana, the Balinese philosophy emphasizing harmony between the spiritual world, people, and nature.
Walking through Jatiluwih made those ideas tangible. Students observed irrigation channels, agricultural terraces, local plants, farming activities, and the surrounding community while learning how farmers cooperate and how rice is cultivated and harvested.
Professor Suriani's teaching also highlights Jatiluwih as an example of how agriculture, conservation, tourism, and rural economic development can coexist. Local varieties such as Balinese red rice are not simply agricultural products; their continued cultivation contributes to biodiversity, local identity, and farmers' livelihoods. This raises an important question for sustainable tourism: Can tourism help preserve an agricultural landscape without reducing agriculture to scenery In Jatiluwih, the rice terraces remain working landscapes shaped by farmers, community organization, water management, and generations of knowledge.
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Walking through tropical vegetation with Professor Suriani, students learned surrounded by the landscapes, sounds, plants, and communities they were studyingturning Bali itself into part of the learning experience.
The field lecture also encouraged students to look beyond what was visible. A major part of Professor Suriani's work focuses on soil health, biofertilizers, and biopesticides as alternatives that can reduce dependence on conventional chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Her lecture explains how beneficial microorganisms can support nutrient cycling, organic matter decomposition, plant growth, and biological control. Agricultural and animal waste can also be returned to productive systems through compost and other forms of biofertilizer rather than simply becoming waste. The principle behind it is straightforward: Healthy soil supports healthy plants. Healthy plants support healthy food. Healthy food supports healthy life. After exploring agriculture at landscape scale in Jatiluwih, the students continued to Dewandaru Organic Farm to see how some of these ideas could become part of everyday life.
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From tree to cup begins here. Pak Susila of Dewandaru Organic Farm introduces students to coffee fruit growing directly on the farm, beginning an unexpected hands-on lesson in how one of the world’s most familiar drinks starts its journey.
Dewandaru Organic Farm: Sustainability You Can Taste
Professor Suriani and her husband, Pak Susila, welcomed the group to a table already filled with passion fruit, bananas, and other produce harvested directly from the farm. And then came the promised durian. As Professor Suriani introduced the farm, students learned about the diversity of plants cultivated around the property and their different purposes. Some provide food, others have herbal uses, while flowers grown on the property can be supplied to hotels. The farm demonstrated an important part of sustainable agriculture that can sometimes be overlooked: it also needs to support livelihoods.
Growing different crops, maintaining biodiversity, developing local products, and connecting agriculture with tourism can create several sources of value rather than relying on a single agricultural commodity.
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From harvesting the coffee fruit to roasting and processing the beans by hand, students followed the journey of coffee step by step. Here, one student practices traditional winnowing, using a woven bamboo tray to separate the roasted coffee beans from the remaining husks before they are ground into coffee powder.
From Coffee Beans to a Cup of Coffee
One of the most memorable activities of the afternoon was completely spontaneous. After finding coffee beans growing on the farm, Professor Suriani suggested that the students make their own coffee. They removed the beans from their skins, sifted them, traditionally roasted them until dark and fragrant, and finally crushed them into coffee powder. Suddenly, an everyday product became a lesson in food production.
Coffee was no longer simply something purchased from a café. Students could see the work, resources, knowledge, and agricultural processes behind the finished product. And, naturally, Professor Suriani sent them home with the coffee they had made.
The learning continued just as spontaneously. During the farm tour, Pak Halili spotted a ripe jackfruit and returned with two enormous fruits. Cleo and Gaby had never tasted fresh jackfruit before, so one was opened immediately. After passion fruit, bananas, durian, and jackfruit, the group had experienced agricultural biodiversity in perhaps its most enjoyable form. Students also collected fresh chilies and explored the herbal and agricultural plants growing throughout the property.
These moments are exactly what distinguish field-based learning from classroom instruction. Instead of looking at photographs of tropical crops, students could touch, harvest, process, taste, and ask questions about them while learning directly from the people cultivating them.
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A final group photo at Dewandaru Organic Farm after an afternoon of learning, harvesting, tasting, and plenty of unexpected discoveries. The experience showed students how biodiversity, food production, local knowledge, hospitality, and sustainable living can all grow from the same piece of land, thank you Prof. Suri and family for having us!
Seeing Sustainability as Everyday Life
By the end of the afternoon, nobody seemed particularly eager to leave. The hospitality of Professor Suriani and Pak Susila was certainly part of that, but so was the opportunity to observe a way of living in which food production, biodiversity, household life, local knowledge, research, and economic activity existed alongside one another.
At Jatiluwih, students encountered sustainability at the scale of a cultural landscape and farming community. At Dewandaru Organic Farm, they encountered it through a garden, a medicinal plant, a fruit tree, a handful of coffee beans, and the people caring for them. The field lecture showed that sustainable agriculture does not have to remain an abstract environmental ambition.
It can be practiced through how water is shared, how soil is cared for, how biodiversity is protected, how local products support livelihoods, and how knowledge is passed from one person to another. The students arrived to study sustainable agriculture. They left having experienced what it can look and taste like when sustainability becomes part of everyday life.
by upskill team
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