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Living with the Land Review

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Living with the Land

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Category: Amusement Parks
Location: Epcot

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Fodor's Review:

Duration: 14 min.

Crowds: Moderate all day.

Strategy: The line moves fairly quickly, so go anytime. Use Fastpass in the case of peak season crowds.

Audience: Teens and adults.

Rating: ***

A boat ride into a faux rain forest is just the beginning of this entertaining tour that focuses on strides in agriculture and aquaculture. You climb aboard a canopied boat that cruises, accompanied by recorded narration, through three biomes—rain forest, desert, and prairie ecological communities—and into an experimental greenhouse that demonstrates how food sources may be grown in the future, not only on the planet but also in outer space. Shrimp, sunshine bass, tilapia, eels, catfish, and alligators are raised in controlled aquacells, and tomatoes, peppers, and squash thrive in the Desert Farm area via drip irrigation that delivers just the right amount of water and nutrients to their roots. Gardeners are usually interested in the section on integrated pest management, which relies on "good" insects like ladybugs to control more harmful predators. Everyone enjoys seeing Mickey Mouse-shaped fruits and vegetables (there may be pumpkins, cucumbers, or watermelons) nurtured with the help of molds created by the Land's science team; scientists also are growing a "tomato tree"—the first of its kind in the United States—that yields thousands of tomatoes from a single vine. Many of the growing areas are actual experiments-in-progress, in which Disney and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have joined forces to produce, say, a sweeter pineapple or a faster-growing pepper. The plants (including the tomato tree's golf-ball-size tomatoes) and fish that grow in the greenhouse are regularly harvested for use in the Land's restaurants.

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