Regenerative Thinking: The Foundation of Hope

As I stand on the highest point of the 75 acres of land my wife and I recently purchased here in Bridgewater Township in Northfield, Minnesota, I can't avoid feeling overwhelmed.

Don't take me wrong, this land purchase is the realization of one of the most important dreams I have had since I came to this country in 1992. Since I came to Minnesota from Guatemala, I have been working with farmers by helping them build their homes, restore old buildings, market their CSA shares, buying shares for our family. Always looking for a connection that can bring me back home to the land.

I am more than excited about this new place where we plan to make our final home, but I also have a full-time job, an almost 19-year old son that has not started college, two grown kids that moved to California but continue to be a top priority. I am one of 9 brothers and 4 sisters and except for five of us the rest live in Guatemala. My parents are aging quickly and I have to stay ready to go anytime. There is much more going on, and this new farm will take all of the bandwidth left after all of those priorities are covered. When I stop to think about it too long it does feel overwhelming, and every time that happens I am reminded that it is exactly that feeling that drives many of us to not stop and to keep hoping for, and building systems that can turn the tide towards a regenerative agriculture future. When meditating on the whole thing longer, it is clear this is the life I want to live, a way of living that cares for the mind, the body and the spirit.

I have dedicated my whole adult life to regenerative farming, or better said, to "Indigenous Agriculture." These ancestral ways of living within nature's cycles, of learning from it, of being within it, of thinking, knowing, generates a different connection to the land and how we interact with it. The way we farm becomes a whole different paradigm than the conventional linear, extractive, and colonizing way we are stuck with when we can connect all of the dots.

Since 2004 I have been developing a regenerative poultry production model. This model is now codified into a farming system, which is now further codified into a regenerative agriculture design. Along this path, I have followed a process in alignment with indigenous ways, complemented by extensive training in conventional and organic agriculture, first while growing up in the rainforest of Guatemala where my elders were incredibly generous with their teachings. Then at the Escuela Nacional Central de Agricultura and the Facultad de Agronomia de la Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. Furthermore, I decided to pair the training in agriculture with a minor in communications and a major in business management from Augsburg University. I figured that this schooling, plus the multiple business ventures I directly founded (Peace Coffee) or indirectly supported should do it as far as preparing myself for a career in indigenous agriculture.

Standing here in the middle of the farm, contemplating the project, the wind blowing hard, sprinkles of light rain crashing against my face, I am no longer overwhelmed by what needs to be done on the farm. Not because it will be easier, but because I know exactly what needs to happen and I know how to make it happen. That sense of security is what changes the whole feeling about the possibilities and I can smile at the possibilities of hope because #sisepuede.

I see on one side of the farm 26 acres of 45 to 60-year-old forest, three seasonal ponds form an interconnected above-ground hydrological web. The frogs are loud, ephemeral plants poke out of the ground taking advantage of the few weeks of sun they will get before the trees leaf out, a flock of wild turkeys has scratched the ground in multiple places, their footprints clearly marked on the muddy areas along the woods' edge. All of this is beautiful, energizing, in no way overwhelming but life giving and hopeful.

What overwhelms me is the magnitude of our disconnection with the rest of the living systems we depend on. This disconnection allows us to confine animals into factory-like conditions, install drainage tile and turn this precious life living liquid into an ecological liability. This disconnection drives us to drive tractors pulling plows, discs, planters with seeds foreign to the land, roll large tanks of poisons that kill the very biology of the soil on which the energy transformation capacity of the land depends to feed and sustain us.

We have developed justifications for everything we do that is destructive, we have internalized those excuses, build brainwashing campaigns, a corporate system, and government structures to subsidize this way of doing things. We have driven these colonizing ways until we all feel that we must support those ways to be patriotic, to support the economy. We have come to the point when we can't see the collective capacity out of these ways which leads to individual depression and inability to see how our individual acts can make a difference. But all of this is true only in our heads, in reality, we built this system ourselves, and in the same way we did so, we can also build a different one. It is actually that simple, it is for me, and it is too for millions more working for a better future.

So how does this way of thinking materialize? centered on the mighty chicken, we have built a full system blueprint for how we can collectively transform this sector and as a result join others transforming multiple parts of other systems and infrastructure. It is actually that simple, but we have to be willing to make the investments, personal and collectively to make this happen. And then choose to support those systems we are building so the old obsolete ones can become part of the history of how we evolved.

The most radical thing to do today, is to keep supporting this dominant agriculture system that endangers our existence at a scale that guarantees another mass extinction, a mass extinction which is completely avoidable if we can just start behaving as a rational species instead of operating on the principles of viruses and bacteria defined by their collapse after depleting the energy of the very body that feeds them. To us humans, this body is the earth’s ecosystems and the living systems that we evolved along with. Are we getting the message? Many of us are, this post is about inviting everyone to process this reality and engage in changing things for the better. Of course we can’t just rebuild the planetary systems, we also need to stop those destroying them. So let’s honor everyone on every corner of the world working to push back on the current system but let’s honor them by building the systems that can replace it.

Of the 75 acres we are now responsible for stewarding, 26 are woods. The rest of the farm has been tilled and planted with corn and soybeans for as long as anyone around can remember. There is barely any topsoil left on the high place I am standing. Some of the soil that used to be here is easily found in the lower part of the land, but only some of it. This farm is located in the middle of Heath Creek, a watershed that flows into the Cannon River, which flows into the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico. If I were to pick up the soil filling up the lower land and try to put it back where it was originally since the last glacial activity, it would at best, amount to a little sprinkling. Most of this soil and the hundreds of thousands of pounds of chemicals, insecticides, and herbicides applied over decades in this land are now permanently part of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico as irretrievable life-killing fill. Meanwhile, all of the land that I can see from this higher point on the farm continue to be farmed without regard to the magnificent impact of the way it is managed, or of the magnificent capacity of this ancestral Dakota landscape to deliver us food, shelter, fiber, clean water, fresh air, spiritual healing...

Are you starting to understand why I feel overwhelmed? It is not the farm or what I know I have to do here that does that, it is the sense of disregard for nature I see everywhere around me and the sheer magnitude of the infrastructure and investments that we have made nationally and globally to protect and perpetuate that way of seeing, knowing, living.

But these are thoughts that come here and there because I, like everyone I work with, must understand these issues in order to generate the passion and energy that drives us to do things differently.

Early in 2021, we broadcasted 13 tones of organic fertilizer on all the previously tilled land, then broadcasted pasture seed, and no-tilled a barley crop. We went on to build a driveway and access field roads to the sites where 6 broiler production units will be located. We also drilled a well and installed the electrical supply to the site where our future home, barn, and other farm infrastructure will be built. While contractors were working on infrastructure, we worked alongside many volunteers to plant 8,000 hazelnuts, build trails in the woods, controlled invasive weeds, planted a 8 foot wide pollinator habitat on each side of the driveway, dug up two water reservoirs to start counteracting the effect of the tiling done to the farm over time and also to initiate the process of blocking and clogging the tiling as we restore the soil’s hydrology in the coming years.

The first season in 2021 was hard as we were hit by a drought as soon as we were done planting the hazelnuts, the pasture grew poorly too. But we mowed back everything and placed a nice layer of carbon on the soil which turned into the biggest asset for the start of the 2022 season. During the spring of 2022 we planted 3,500 elderberry stems and harvested the first hay cutting. Most if it will be used to mulch and protect critical areas and to build out the organic matter in the areas where we will be planting black beans and garlic which we have been continually growing in larger quantities for the last four years.

The broiler units seat on 1.5 acres have capacity for 1,500 birds per flock and up to three flocks per season. In total there will be 6 broiler production units for a total of 27,000 birds per year and enough manure to secure the fertility and vigor for the rest of the farm including the areas where alley crops (beans, garlic, tomatillo, will be grown in the alleys between hazelnut rows). The pasture was planted on the whole farm and will serve as forage for the chickens within the paddocks. The remaining of the farm which is already planted to hazelnuts and elderberries will be grazed as part of a new regional Dorper Sheep farmers collective. On the woods we will be building up to 20 glamping sites with platforms and wall tents and hope to open to the public in the spring of 2023. Five of those structures will be built as tiny houses for an artists in residence program and temporary housing for interns.

As part of a regional Poultry-Centered Regenerative poultry system working under the Tree-Range(R) brand we purchased a poultry processing facility along the border with IA. Similarly, we will be drawing up the plans and structuring the scaling-up strategy for processing mid-size livestock and collective branding, aggregation, marketing, and distribution.

Our farm is not a stand-alone operation, understanding what it takes to change a system also means understanding that alone a small farm is simply too risky. Regionally, we are organizing the first regenerative poultry collective to be aggregated to collectives we are supporting in other regions.

When I feel overwhelmed about what is in front of us at a system level, I turn around and look at all that we already have, especially our relationships, and the sense that we will indeed create the system change we need. The energy that this feeling and the possibilities generate is sufficient to power us for years and excite others so we can further minimize inherent challenges and facilitate the process of regeneration.

We hope that you will help us gain more energy and turn around those moments when we have to face the fact that we are a tiny spot in the larger context of regenerating the planet, but we ARE a spot, part of the solution, that matters and energizes us, and we invite you to be part of this emerging story.