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You’ve floated past all of it. Most people have. Living with the Land is fourteen minutes of greenhouses in the back half of The Land pavilion, it has never had a queue worth mentioning, and it is somehow the ride a certain kind of EPCOT person will defend hardest.

It also isn’t the ride it started as. Not even close.

It had a song, and a person

When EPCOT opened on October 1, 1982, this was Listen to the Land — Kraft-sponsored, and crucially, narrated live. An actual cast member stood in your boat and talked you through it. The theme song was written and sung by Bob Moline, who’d been writing for Disney since the mid-seventies and had a real hand in the sound of early EPCOT.

A live guide changes what a ride is. It meant no two trips were identical, and it meant the person in the boat could read the room.

The opening they deleted and never replaced

The original began with Symphony of the Seed — a surreal sequence putting you underground at the scale of a germinating seed, all abstract projection and score.

In 1993 the sponsorship moved from Kraft to Nestlé, the attraction was renamed Living with the Land, and it closed that September for a rebuild. It came back in December with a new opening — the thunderstorm you ride through now — a new score, and a new ending.

Symphony of the Seed didn’t come back. The song went with it. The live guide eventually followed.

The wall at the end

Here’s the part that gets people.

After the last greenhouse, the boat turns and the lights come up on a montage of faces and produce from everywhere, and the music does the thing the music does. It’s maybe forty seconds. It’s the reason grown adults get emotional on an agriculture tour.

Disney has never published who any of those people are. No names, no locations, no plaques. They’ve just been there since 1993, smiling at every boat that comes around the corner, and nobody who rides regularly has ever been able to find out anything about them.

That anonymity is arguably the point. The finale’s whole argument is that this is everybody — that a ride about soil was a ride about people the entire time.

Where the blueberries come from

One of the kids on that wall is holding blueberries, which turns out to be a bigger question than it looks.

Blueberries are originally North American. The wild lowbush kind — Maine’s crop — still only really grows here, on the glacial barrens of Downeast Maine and up through Atlantic Canada, where they came up after the ice retreated about ten thousand years ago. The Wabanaki Confederacy — Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot — have harvested them there ever since, as food, medicine, and dye. They were also the first to figure out that a blueberry barren wants to burn. Fire after harvest returns nutrients to the soil, suppresses pests, and brings the next crop in stronger. Colonists adopted the practice in the 1600s and it remains standard. The Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry Company still works its barrens on a two-year cycle, burning the half that’s resting.

That’s the wild berry. The cultivated one left home and never looked back. China now grows roughly a third of the world’s blueberries. Peru exports more than any other country. Chile, Spain, Mexico, and Morocco are all climbing.

So a child holding a basket of blueberries could be from very nearly anywhere — which is either a fact about global agriculture or the entire thesis of the ride, depending on how you’re feeling when the lights come up.

What’s still in there

The greenhouses are real. The fish are real. The crops rotate, the growing techniques genuinely change, and the produce goes to the restaurants upstairs. It’s the only ride in Walt Disney World where the show elements are alive and someone has to feed them.

The song is gone, the guide is gone, and the seed sequence has been dark for thirty years. But the boat still turns that last corner, and the lights still come up on all those faces.

Fourteen minutes about dirt. Forty seconds about everybody.

Sources for the curious: the EPCOT Legacy archive and Make Mine Music on Bob Moline and the 1982 score, the University of Maine Cooperative Extension and the Wild Blueberry Heritage Center on the barrens, MOFGA’s reporting on the Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry Company, and Blueberries Consulting for the global production numbers.

— Kylie