As much as we are passionate about adding as many trees to the landscape as possible with the engagement of community members, we believe it is just as critical to include agroforestry in our portfolio of Forest Landscape Restoration projects. This doesn’t mean we are turning away from trees, since by definition, agroforestry simply refers to trees in agricultural landscapes. That’s why we have established a sustainable silvopastoral system to showcase how cattle and biodiversity can coexist on the landscape.

We have started a focus group of local ranchers (pictured above) interested in both support for implementing more sustainable ranching practices, and in connecting to carbon finance projects that will eventually allow them to earn income as a result of environmentally friendly cattle management.

None of this would be possible without the collaboration of our foreman, Ricardo “Beto” Calderon, who has been a rancher his whole life, and who is now managing his head of cattle (pictured below) on one of our properties. Our resident artist Karla Esquivel (pictured below) has painted our educational signage about the five key components of the sustainable silvopastoral system: 1) rotational grazing, 2) water access in each pasture, 3) a creek or other water source fenced off from the cattle to avoid erosion and contamination, 4) forage banks that provide alternate food sources to the cattle (in our case we have successfully established a forage bank of the plant Mexican sunflower or Tithonia latifolia, which is high in protein and releases phosphorous into the soil) , and 5) living fences of tree species that attract birds.