Regenerating New Mexico
Catalyzing Landscape-scale Regeneration of Farming Communities and their Ecosystems
Partner organizations New Mexico Healthy Soil, High Water Mark, Ecotone Landscape Planning, and Trees Water & People have started a collaborative initiative with the goal of achieving landscape-scale restoration and food system change as an expression of a larger and lasting impact of soil health improvement.
The purpose of this project is to establish regional regenerative food systems that can restore ecosystems and establish thriving economies and environments to an extent not possible through interventions at an individual farm scale.
The Dutch NGO Commonland has developed a consensus-based, community-centered approach for envisioning and carrying out landscape-scale regeneration. This methodology is being employed successfully internationally in semi-arid regions such as Spain, South Africa and Australia. Our partnership is bringing this framework to the US for the first time.
Key elements:
- Assembling community-sourced and science-based assessments of several potential focus areas within New Mexico and choosing one as project area;
- Gathering stakeholders and creating a common vision for a thriving landscape-level ecosystem mutually beneficial for agriculture and the environment;
- Cooperatively planning and enacting a progression of location-specific practices that work toward the shared vision and learning from the implementation;
- Identifying and scaling regenerative agricultural businesses based on the common vision.
Problem Statement
Farming communities in New Mexico experience a multitude of interconnected challenges, including climate change, drought, extreme wildfires and flooding, diminishing natural resources, rural economic depression, and conflicts over water. The COVID pandemic has shown the vulnerability of our current food system, exposing food insecurity, supply chain gaps, a lack of basic infrastructure as well as systemic racial and social inequities.
Addressing these problems one farm at a time has not proven to be very effective when one considers the magnitude of the problem. Worldwide, rural development organizations are calling for community-driven, integrated approaches with mutually beneficial outcomes for agriculture and the environment to provide systemic and long-lasting solutions.
Proposed Solution
Commonland’s interdisciplinary and bottom-up approach brings together conservation and agriculture to develop production systems that are embraced by the community and embedded into the ecosystem.
Working directly with farmers and ranchers to build diversified regenerative businesses requires that our process is community-driven, with a focus on just, inclusive, and equitable relationships among participants.
We are using regenerative agriculture to achieve ecological, financial, social and cultural benefits – the so-called 4 Returns:
Phase One
The first key element was completed in 2023 after conducting assessments of three study areas in New Mexico and selecting the South-Jemez Plateau within the Northern Rio Grande region as our project area.
Assessment of three potential focus areas in New Mexico
Click HERE to access the StoryMap
The Southern Jemez Plateau is a high-desert, post-fire landscape consisting of deep canyons between ridges formed from sandstone and volcanic material that support woodland savannah ecosystems of oak shrub and remnants of ponderosa pine forest. The area is under federal management by the Santa Fe National Forest and the National Park Service and includes a small number of private inholdings.
Since time immemorial this has been the homeland of Native American people associated with several Pueblo communities. Together with non-native communities further downstream, they rely on water and ecosystem services originating in the plateau to support livelihoods and food production, and for cultural reasons. Five consecutive catastrophic wildfires have destroyed the once productive forest and riparian ecosystems, threatening to sever this deep connection.
Forest landscape restoration in this area holds promise for bringing back natural water flows, soil health for water holding capacity and plant regeneration, native vegetation cover and habitat, and once abundant wildlife. These ecosystem components are essential to the livelihoods, well-being, community cohesion, and spiritual identity of downstream residents. Furthermore, the restoration process toward ecosystem health and productivity presents an opportunity for strengthening and expanding the regional land stewardship economy and know-how. Such improvements in the regional economy and knowledge base would support downstream farm businesses, create lasting job opportunities for younger generations, diversify the regional economy, and connect the ecological restoration work with regional suppliers of plants and other restoration supplies and services.
We envision that by 2043/2050 as a result of the achieved–and ongoing–restoration work, we will have built a regenerative local food system that supports the transformation of degraded ecosystems and revitalization of farming communities. This vision will serve farmers and ranchers, the communities they feed and the watersheds they depend on. Together, the producers, community members, nonprofits and agencies driving this transformative change will build diversified businesses, using regenerative agriculture and a restoration-based stewardship economy not only to improve soil health and ecology but also to address social and economic challenges in the region.
Our partners: