From the archive
16 Sep 2026
Drive through southern Minnesota in summer and the pattern is unrelenting: corn, then soybeans, then corn again, field after field with barely a tree between them. Near Northfield, one farm interrupts it. Salvatierra Farms is small for the neighbourhood at sixty-three acres, but what marks it out is not size. Maple trees stand over the land and native hazelnut bushes grow in thickets, and beneath and between them the place runs as a working farm with no herbicides, no pesticides and no chemical fertiliser in any of its operations.
The farm was once conventional row crops like everything around it. The person who changed it is Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, an agronomist who grew up in the northern Guatemalan rainforest. His method joins two kinds of education: formal agricultural training, and what he was taught by the Indigenous elders of his home country. Poultry sits at the centre of the system, raised within the tree and bush cover rather than in sheds on bare ground.
Haslett-Marroquin has said plainly that he wants the farm to stand as a model others can work from, and the circle gathering around it is not the usual one. It includes Lakota tribal members, farmers who once operated at large scale, and Catholic sisters, people who have arrived at the same piece of ground from very different directions and stayed. That is as much of the story as the agronomy.
The core of this system is poultry under woody cover, and it starts small: a dozen or so birds in a mobile coop moved through existing hedgerow or scrub gives them shade, shelter and forage while their scratching and manure work the ground. A basic mobile coop can be built from salvaged timber and wire mesh for a few hundred pounds, and the rotation is measured in days, not seasons.
Regeneration International · Associated Press · Read the source