From the archive
15 Sep 2026
Drive through southern Minnesota in high summer and the pattern holds for miles: corn, then soybeans, then corn again, field after field with nothing taller than a fence post. Then, near Northfield, the line breaks. Maple trees rise over native hazelnut bushes, and beneath them a small farm works to a different logic. Salvatierra Farms covers 63 acres - modest next to its neighbours - and not long ago it was a conventional row crop operation indistinguishable from the sprawl around it.
The change is the work of Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, an agronomist who grew up in the rainforest of northern Guatemala. He farms poultry among the perennials, keeps the ground covered with a diversity of crops, and uses no herbicides, no pesticides and no chemical fertiliser anywhere in the operation. His method draws on two educations at once: a formal training in agronomy and the knowledge passed down by Indigenous elders at home. He is explicit that the farm is meant to be looked at and copied, not admired as an exception.
Around the farm an unlikely company has gathered - Lakota tribal members, farmers who once ran large conventional acreages, and Catholic sisters - people whose reasons for tending land carefully are matters of conviction as much as agronomy. That is as much as the published opening of this report tells us; the fuller account sits with the Associated Press. What is already clear is the shape of the experiment: a small, wooded, chemical-free holding, deliberately placed in the middle of industrial grain country, holding itself up as a pattern rather than a refuge.
If you keep poultry, give them a woody edge instead of a bare paddock. Plant native hazel or similar shrubs along the fence line - a few pounds per whip - and let the birds range beneath once the thicket closes, which takes three to five years. Shelter, forage and no spraying, all from the same row.
Regeneration International · Associated Press · Read the source