What is “Agroscope”?

Agroscope is Switzerland’s federal agricultural research center, headquartered near Bern with experimental stations across the country. Since around 2017, Agroscope has piloted rice paddies in the Swiss Mittelland as a climate-adaptation crop: warmer summers and wetter wetlands have made parts of Switzerland viable for rice growing for the first time in modern history. The word Agroscope itself is a portmanteau of agro- and -scope.

This clip is a Swiss woman explaining how she became a Reisbäuerin (“rice-farmer-woman”). She was approached by Agroscope to run a trial paddy and turned it into a working farm. Reisbäuerin is the kind of word Swiss German loves: a transparent compound for an unusual job.