From the archive
16 Aug 2026
On the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of July, fifty-three smallholder farmers travelled to Vía Orgánica, Regeneration International's sister organisation in Mexico, in the state of Guanajuato. They came from sixteen different municipalities, and they spent two days away from their plots, sitting with interviewers and answering questions: how big is your plot, what grows on it, what animals do you keep, what are you exposed to in the way of pesticides.
The instrument was TAPE, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's Tool for Agroecological Performance Evaluation. It scores ten elements of a farm's sustainability from nought to a hundred, and it is built to work at the scale of a single plot. The same framework that asks about biodiversity, vegetation and income also asks about social context and women's empowerment, so a low score there appears on the page next to a low score for the landscape, and has to be answered for in the same way.
The session opened an eighteen-month collaboration between Renature and Regeneration International, which aims to train two hundred smallholder farmers - half men, half women, as an explicit target - in the agave-and-companion-tree agroforestry of the Billion Agave Project. The July assessment establishes the baseline against which everything after will be measured. Soil samples have been taken from the fields of every farmer interviewed, and are being analysed for physical, chemical and biological parameters.
More field interviews follow over the coming months. The point of scoring each plot at the start is that the project can track how each one changes as the months pass - comparing like with like, rather than judging one farm against another that started from different ground. The scores will be processed into recommendations, and the effort goes to whichever element scores lowest, instead of guessing from a distance which part of a stranger's farm needs fixing.
TAPE comes from the FAO and is built to run on a single plot. A growers' group can work through it in an afternoon per farm: score the ten elements from 0 to 100, take a soil sample the same day, and repeat in a year. The weakest score tells you where the work is.
Regeneration International · Read the source