Regenerating Degraded Land in Honduras

Hey everyone, my name is Kevin Cruz. I'm a regenerative farmer dedicated to the pursuit of combining ecological restoration with sustainable food production. I am starting this campaign to help fund a regenerative agroforesty project in Honduras.

The story starts in a tiny village nestled in the hilly landscape of Comayagua in Central Honduras. This village is called Las Guacamayas, and it’s the birthplace of my mother, grandmother, and countless other family members and ancestors. In 2013, my parents purchased a parcel of land in this village, and have since then built a beautiful home on the top portion of the property.

When we first bought the property however, we were not sure what to do with it all, so we rented out the bottom, more arable portion to different family members for their corn and bean production throughout the years. Unfortunately, this meant the slashing and burning of the land and the usage of chemical herbicides/fungicides and fertilizers typical of most subsistence farmers in this area. Needless to say, the land slowly degraded over the years.

It wasn’t until late 2016, when I started my organic farming journey, that I decided to take more responsibility for that lower part of the property. The first thing I did was stop renting out the land and let it rest. As expected, the land turned into what locals call “guamil”, an overgrown thicket of grasses, vines and other fast-growing, often thorny plants that take over the land after the last harvest. So the next step was to keep the “guamil” at bay. From 2017 onwards, the maintenance of the property was simply to chop everything down with machetes before it got too thick. This tactic had many benefits. It was simple and cheap, helped improve the soil over the years, and bought me some time to figure out exactly what I wanted to do with the land. The major downside to this indiscriminate chopping was that it kept resetting ecological succession back to the very beginning, preventing any trees from establishing themselves.

In the late summer of 2020, after years of studying regenerative agroforestry techniques, I was finally ready to get serious with the land. I had a family member plant out a small patch of bananas on the property. The purpose of the banana patch was to kickstart biological processes and supply future trees with nutrients and water ( both of which are abundant inside of banana stems).

In May of 2021, my partner Laura and I were able to implement the very first plantings. We gathered tons of seeds and cuttings from the surrounding area and made small nests for the seeds, covering them with any biomass we could find. Because our banana patch wasn’t fully grown yet, we gathered some banana stems from a neighbor's property and painstakingly hauled them to the bottom of our property to help fertilize/irrigate our nests.

We also modified the management of the land during this visit, and any trees that were re-sprouting from the base were spared the machete.

I returned to the property in May of 2022 to inspect the results. The small shift in land management allowed pioneer trees like Cecropias to establish themselves and shade out other aggressive plants, leaving mostly grasses, which are much easier to manage.

As for the plantings, the biggest success by far were the cashew trees. Cashews are extremely resilient and drought tolerant, and will serve many functions in the early stages of succession. They start fruiting in only 3-5 years, which will not only provide the community with fresh fruit, but will also attract local pollinators and seed dispersers. They are also evergreen and will provide much needed shade to more sensitive trees that I plant in the future.

At this point, the banana patch was finally filled out, so I thinned the clumps heavily to promote the health and longevity of the clumps. The ensuing banana biomass was combined with the biomass from the pioneer trees to help mulch and fertilize the young Cashew trees. Afterwards, I used the remaining biomass to make resilient planting spaces in which I seeded more Cashews and tons other support species.

And that's currently the state of our property in Honduras. After 4 years of continuous chopping and dropping, the stage was set for ecological succession and regeneration to occur. Now, in the course of a little over a year, this land is well on it’s way to becoming an abundant forest filled with food, fuel, fodder, medicine and genetic material.

If you wish to support this project, consider donating or sharing this video with anyone you think will be interested. This will obviously be a life long project, but this specific campaign will be up for roughly one year. Most of the funds donated will go towards:

Thanks in advance to all who donate :)