Francisco, Rancho Pueblo Viejo
The Climate Crisis as Culture Crisis
“Más años difíciles. Más sequías. El principal cambio es la necesidad.”
More tough years. More drought. The catalyst is necessity.
Francisco González manages Rancho Pueblo Viejo, a 160-hectare ranch tucked into a valley in the highlands of Jalisco. Intensively-grazed cattle ranches dominate the valley, but you don’t see much vegetation covering the soil. The natural ecosystem is aptly called a bosque espinoso (spiny forest). Pretty much all the trees and shrubs have thorns.
Francisco bought the ranch 6 years ago after rotating around commercial ranches and greenhouses. When Francisco moved in, the property looked like the rest of the valley – mostly devoid of vegetation, the vegetation that remained was thorny, and the land was dry and eroded.
Francisco started by bringing a small number of cattle onto the land, rotating the herd around the paddocks as much as the natural growth of the pasture would allow. He was rotationally-grazing (a holistic management cornerstone) out of necessity more than principle.* Start-up costs (feed, fertilizer, antibiotics) in conventional ranching are expensive and more so every year.
* Regenerative agriculture celebrity Gabe Brown turned to regenerative ranching after his conventional methods failed year after year and he was nearly bankrupt.
The Circularity of Holistic Management
Year after year, Francisco re-invested in the ecology of the land. In return, the economics of the land flourished. First, he focused on bringing life back to the land. Rotational grazing of cattle fertilizes and hydrates the soil. Vitality in the soil increases vegetation growth, which allowed Francisco to increase herd size. More animals grazing the land re-cycles more and more nutrients and moisture into the soil leading to even healthier vegetation and ranch profits.
With rehabilitated soil and cattle as a foundation, Francisco re-invested into greater biodiversity of the land including sheep, chickens, and honey bees as well as fields of oats and alfalfa. Soon he re-forested portions of the land with native mesquite trees.*
Today, nearly all the nutrition for his animals comes from the land (lower inputs) and Francisco has several income streams (more output). Wildlife has returned to the property including wild boar, la musaraña (a Mexican shrew endangered by industrial agriculture), and worms (which disappear in soils lacking organic material). He weaves together the ecology and economy of the landscape. All life flourishes from the microbiota of the soil to the vegetation, cash crops, domesticated animals, wildlife, and human stewards.
Despite the visible vitality of Francisco’s land, he faces sharp criticism from neighbors. They think he’s foolish for mixing cattle with trees or growing food on-farm rather than buying feed. They don’t trust a way of life that breaks from tradition, that they don’t know or understand. I’ve seen a similar mindset from investors with traditional backgrounds. Regenerative agriculture sounds great, but only when it fits the quick, simple liquidity cycles of industrial business models.
* Mesquite is a super tree for silvopasture. Combats soil erosion, shades the animals, and drops high-protein bean-like pods for fodder.
The Climate Crisis As Culture Crisis
Potentially the hardest part about rehabilitating our planet is changing how people think. As a society and a species we have to transition from prioritizing linear extraction of the environment to holistic management of the biosphere. We have to believe that only by prioritizing ecosystem health can we create sustainable, resilient economic wealth.
How do you change someone’s mind? I asked Francisco how to convince his neighbors to transition to holistic land management.
“Más años. Más sequías. El principal cambio es la necesidad.” More tough years. More drought. The catalyst is necessity.
In the arc of the Western worldview, each prevailing worldview became dominant because it promised absolute knowledge and security to civilization. Often in the form of control over the environment and/or divine salvation. Then, when it became clear that the worldview was not the be-all-end-all truth as proclaimed, a new worldview emerged. This happened with the transition from animism to Greek philosophy to Christianity to today’s industrial capitalist paradigm. Humans abhor the unknown, and we cling to what we believe to be true and certain.
Until faced with the irrefutable reality that we were wrong.
Every year a conventional ranch grows less nutrition on their property as the water table dries up and soil turns to lifeless dust. They become more dependent on synthetic fertilizer, agrichemicals, and imported feed. The dosage and price rise every year. Eventually, they will need to do something different.
As a society, we are starting to wake up to the reality that science is a fallible process to acquire knowledge, not an absolute truth in and of itself. That industrial logic is fundamentally unsustainable on a planet with finite resources. That we are digging our own grave by insatiably extracting, exploiting, and consuming. As faith in the industrial capitalist paradigm fades, I believe we’re at the precipice of the next shift in the Western worldview – one that prioritizes human stewardship and symbiosis with all life.
Humanity’s most powerful advantage is our intellect, but it’s a tool. With our intellect, we build machines of mass destruction and machines of mass construction. Attentive human stewardship, like that of Francisco, drastically shortens the time it takes to rehabilitate an ecosystem. For example, the Miyawaki Forest Creation Method accelerates the regeneration of native growth forests to 20-30 years from 150-200 years in the wild. If individuals around the world, especially those in positions of power, choose to employ this tool in service to life, we can solve the biodiversity and climate crisis in a generation.
