Youth Exchange „Fields of Tomorrow: Rethinking Urban Agriculture and Future-Proof Food Systems“ in Berlin
26th of October – 8th of November 2025
This report has been written by Solenn and Gio, two of our participants of Fields of Tomorrow 2025.
Week 1
We all met on Sunday, October 26th, 2025. That evening, we were all strangers to each other, and we didn’t know yet that we would soon become a motivated and involved group of friends. The two following weeks that followed that day were full of learning, gardening, enlightening discussions, fun and beautiful connections.
Before all of that happened, we had to start getting to know each other. Our first full day as a group was dedicated to trying (and struggling) to remember our names, talking about our intentions and expectations of the project, discussing the timetable for the following days and, of course, working on some logistical details.
The real fun started on Tuesday. Our first field trip was programmed that day, and we were determined not to let the cold and rainy weather ruin our motivation.
After a journey on public transport, we arrived at he 2000m2-Weltacker , which is an educational site in the botanical public park in Berlin Blankenfelde-Pankow. We learned about different agricultural practices, visualised the surface area necessary for various foods and dishes, and played games to internalise all the information we learned. It was really interesting to discover the meaning behind the name of the 2000m²-Weltacker: if you divide the total surface of agricultural land in the world by the number of people on our planet, guess what you get? 2000m2 of available agricultural land per person to live on!
This number will only decrease in the future, as we’re losing land to urbanisation while the number of people on Earth keeps growing. Thus, it is important to be aware of our consumption’s needs in terms of surface area.
That same day, we also split up into three groups, each with its own mission. The first group worked on creating an Actionbound; the second group worked on communicating about our activities and missions on social media and other platforms; and finally, the third group worked on creating a public advocacy campaign which was to take place the second week of the program.
Wednesday, the fun continued with our first community garden visit. It immediately got us into the Halloween mood: the Prinzessinnengarten Kollektiv Berlin is a 7.5 hectare ecological space right in the city centre, set on the St. Jacobi cemetery. It is a beautiful green area for everyone to enjoy, with a true community feeling for the garden’s volunteers.
That evening, the French team hosted our first cultural night of the exchange. It was an opportunity to learn about french food (apéro, ratatouille, and sweets that came straight from France), quirky french expressions, and cool music. The evening was a real success, making everyone feel a little more French at heart – quelle soirée mémorable!
The next day was a day of reflection and discussion. We were starting to see just how motivated and committed we were as a group. We talked about food waste, our intentions with the project, and the best way to take back our learning to our home countries.
Some of us went to visit a Fairteiler, a community sharing- point located in an intergenerational house, where food that, otherwise would be thrown away, is shared with those who might need it. The space also hosts cultural and social activities such as German-speaking sessions to bring people of different generations together and foster a sense of community and mutual support.
Another group prepared a delicious lunch with leftover food from the previous day. Both activities were in alignment with our discussion and intentions of limiting food waste and learning about ways to care for the community.
We ended the day with a screening of Cowspiracy, which was rather thought-provoking to most members of our group.
Friday finally brought in the true Halloween vibe. After immersing ourselves in Berlin culture by having Döner for lunch, we went to the ElisaBeet: another community garden, also located in a cemetery.
We put our hands in the dirt, joining volunteers who were uprooting dead sunflowers, working on the vegetable patches, and picking up trash. Our hard work was rewarded as we went home with some delicious apples, grown in the garden.
Then, it was the German team’s turn to impress everyone with another fun-filled cultural night: we had a taste of German electro music, amazing apple cake, and a fun game about young German people’s slang. It was another evening that we all will remember – Es war der Hammer!
No rest – even on weekends for our hard workers! On Saturday morning, we woke up early to take the train all the way to Frankfurt (Oder), right next to the Polish border. Our plan for the day was to volunteer at PlantAge, an ecological and vegan farm. Some of our group members worked on the celery patch, while others were taking care of the beetroots.
A vegan farm? – You might think that that’s a paradoxon… But what it means is that they only use plant-based fertilisers. Thanks to that, our team got to see many bugs and small animals thriving on the grounds!
The first week wrapped up with a free Sunday. This allowed us to rest, and, for some of us, to visit the city of Berlin and experience its cool and unique atmosphere.
Week 2
Our second week started at Peace of Land, a wonderful community garden in the heart of Berlin, where its lovely hosts welcomed us with great enthusiasm and kindness.
Here, we discussed the promising reality of urban agriculture, especially through the implementation of permaculture into our society, reflecting on how we would wish our own world to look like: fairness, equality and protection for all living beings, human and non-human, ended up being the common ground of our conversation.
After a delicious (and beautiful!) lunch, offered by Peace of Land, we continued our day by visiting their garden, learning more about their project directly through practice: hands and knees into soil!
In the evening, our Italian members hosted a record-breaking cultural night: a tiramisù competition, some quizzes about Italy and a Tombola were the main activities of the night, followed by a sweaty but fun group dancing session. Si vola!
To digest the amazing food of the previous day, we all agreed to relax and recharge our batteries on Tuesday, working in groups to complete our projects.
Wednesday was our free day: exploration through guided tours or just one’s intuition of Berlin, thrifting and tasty local food were the activities that marked it. At night, we all reunited at Prinzenalle 58, where one member of our group hosted a strikingly thought-provoking art exhibition together with the youth council of Weltacker.
The main topic of the exhibition was the worrying climate emergency our society is facing in relation to food overproduction and consumerism. Through deeply-thought and moving drawings, prints and vision boards, the urgency of climate action was effectively conveyed.
The next day was an important one, to say the least: our advocacy campaign was going to take place in one of the most famous squares of Europe, the Alexanderplatz. The day started early, in order to complete the tasks that we had left (scroll down, to see the result of our work!).
With our posters printed and the batteries of our cameras fully charged, we all headed over to the main square of the capital of Germany, where we set up our desks and drawings, nervous but excited to start asking people: “Are you truly aware of the impact of your own food choices? “ Some of us were in charge of stopping strangers in the street to ask them a few questions about urban agriculture and food sustainability, in order to get a better idea on how much knowledge people actually have on these kinds of topics.
In the meantime, the others focused on explaining more in detail to those who wanted, who we are and why we were there, as well as initiating deep and hopefully constructive conversations with them. They managed to do this through a clever but fun game, which took inspiration from the famous Italian Tombola we had played the previous Monday.
For the following three hours we tried our best to find common ground with people coming from various social and cultural backgrounds, sharing all the worrying and upsetting information we acquired about climate change and environmental pollution in relation to food production, as well as all the ground-breaking and innovative solutions we learned through the project to effectively contrast and, hopefully, put an end to it.
As the sun was setting, we decided to pack our stuff and go back home, but not without giving in to a little dance, on the notes of a magnetic street musician who accompanied us throughout the whole public advocacy campaign.
We thought it would never come, but sadly we got to the last day of the Fields of Tomorrow Erasmus+ project. We started with our usual check-in, followed by a deeply felt feedback session. We reminded each other once again of our privilege to be here and all that we’ve learned, experienced and shared in these two incredible weeks that we spent side by side in Berlin.
After a quite emotional and already nostalgic first half of the day, we started the early evening with a curious but incredibly interesting workshop, exploring the colonialist history of Germany’s most loved vegetable: the potato!
Our Peruvian host brilliantly showed us that the history, culture and tradition of Peru and the Andes are tied together by our favorite tuber, while showing us how her native community peels it without breaking the skin into pieces. We stayed for dinner and enjoyed a delicious potato dish typical from Peru, before heading back to our hostel for the last night of the project.
We danced and sang to our favourite songs, we hugged each other tight and spent the night as it was like any other, squished together on the kitchen sofa, as if we were going to wake up the next day and see each other downstairs at breakfast, waiting to harvest another field or visit our next community garden, always ready to learn, share and laugh, as a group.
On Saturday morning we all left the apartment, which still holds, and forever will, all the precious memories we created together. From the sweet “Good morning”s and the “Hurry up or we’ll miss the bus!” to the hallway full of shoes of all shapes and sizes. The two weeks we spent together have bound us forever, in a way that neither distance nor time could ever undo.
We started as three groups from three different nationalities, made up of young people coming from various cultural and social backgrounds, who wanted to know more about sustainability and urban agriculture in order to build a better future for all living beings. Somehow, we ended the project as friends, realizing that even though our paths had once again separated, the love was not to go anywhere, if not to transcend borders.
Our advocacy campaign
You want to see the result of all the work we’ve put into these two weeks? Our campaign video is available on YouTube, so click here and have a look!
Contact information
If you have any questions regarding our international youth exchange, feel free to reach out to us!
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