Rosana Alvarez Martinez
SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE
ORGANIC EDUCATION – ENVIRONMENT REHABILITATION
Rosana Alvarez Martinez
Vía Orgánica
Vía Orgánica (The Organic Way) is a Mexican non-profit organization whose mission is to promote healthy eating and a sustainable future by promoting knowledge and the practice of organic regenerative agriculture, fair trade, social justice, sustainable life and protection of the planet.
The vision for Vía Orgánica is of a Mexico in which organic agriculture, social justice, local commerce, and sustainable life are available to all inhabitants. The Vía Orgánica demonstrative school ranch is located in the Jalpa Valley, 15 kilometers from San Miguel de Allende on 80 hectares. At the farm school, demonstrative practices of organic and regenerative agriculture principles, livestock management, landscape restoration, and agri-food systems are carried out.
“We offer visitors a wide variety of interactive workshops with many options for group and school visits. We offer the opportunity to learn more about regenerative agriculture and its positive solutions for health, the economy and the climate.”
The ranch hosts and receives thousands of visitors each year, including delegations of students, farmers, and activists from all over Mexico.
The Billion Agave Project
The Billion Agave Project is a game-changing ecosystem-regeneration strategy recently adopted by several innovative Mexican farms in the high-desert region of Guanajuato.
This strategy combines the growing of agave plants and nitrogen-fixing companion treespecies (such as mesquite), with holistic rotational grazing of livestock. The result is a high-biomass, high forage-yielding system that works well even on degraded, semi-arid lands. The system produces large amounts of agave leaf and root stem—up to one ton of biomass over the 8-10-year life of the plant. When chopped and fermented in closed containers, this plant material produces an excellent, inexpensive (two cents per pound) animal fodder. This agroforestry system reduces the pressure to overgraze brittle rangelands and improves soil health and water retention, while drawing down and storing massive amounts of atmospheric CO2.
The goal of the Billion Agave campaign is to plant one billion agaves globally to draw down and store one billion tons of climate-destabilizing CO2. The campaign will be funded by donations and public and private investments.
