Project Description
Agroecology
Food Sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food and seeds grown with ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and a right to define their own food and agricultural systems.
As the climate changes, farmers across the world are facing great challenges that threaten their food webs. We look to the seeds as our teachers as well as traditional farmers who hold depths of knowledge and solutions about how to reweave ourselves back into healthy partnerships with our planet.
We help facilitate Campesino a Campesino (farmer to farmer) exchanges that encourage experienced farmers to teach us—and each other—about traditional agricultural practices, seed stewardship, protection of water, and our sacred lands, in order to build resilience and pollinate ideas and solutions.
Initiatives that emerge from these exchanges include home gardens and medicinal plant gardens, the traditional milpa system, soil conservation, reforestation, watershed protection, and the preservation of ancestral seeds.
Current Projects
The Milpa Project: this is a movement in the making! Maya Achi farmer Julian Vasquez Chun is reintroducing the traditional system for growing corn, beans and squash using ancestral seeds. His passion for growing the traditional Milpa system is quickly spreading amongst farmers who are impressed with the results, compared to conventional monoculture corn production. Click here to read more about Julian’s study.
Agroecology work with Qachuu Aloom: this includes support for their work building home gardens, the Milpa system, medicine gardens, and seed festivals.
Seed Saving work in New Mexico: we work to bring back a diversity of seeds that have been shared with us in the desert southwest and we share those seeds with farmers through donation and exchanges.
Amaranth Solidarity Gardens: through the Seed Travels Movement, we plant, harvest and celebrate Amaranth in California, New Mexico, Arizona and more recently in New York.