🍊 Agro-Bioeconomy
A bioregional economy is less a sector than a metabolism: how calories, materials, and attention move through a landscape, and how much of what is produced stays near enough to nourish soils, workers, and local culture. The tension here is familiar—between throughput and care, between commodity logic and the limits of place. T he organizations in this cluster experiment with economies that nourish the land rather than treating it as an open pit for inputs and outputs. Their work implies a question that is both practical and ethical: what would it take for provisioning to feel like continuity rather than extraction—so that livelihoods deepen attachment to place instead of burning through it?
Ontology
Activities
Terra Umida Agroforestry Corridor
Another 30 kilometers along the trail, hikers pass wide degraded farmlands called Terra Umida. This is a government-supported area where the landless farmer movement of Brazil is working under very tough conditions to regenerate degraded land through agroforestry. Sinal do Vale has started building new supply chains for the farmer and food sector, seeing the potential to build a true bioeconomy with these farmers to benefit their livelihoods. This is about rebuilding food systems, forming regenerative supply chains with local producers, and creating economic pathways that align with ecological restoration.
Madre Frutas Social Enterprise
Madre Frutas is a women-led enterprise that turns abundant local jackfruit into marketable products. It models agro-processing tied to regenerative practice, women’s leadership, and economic resilience—creating livelihoods where options are scarce while respecting what the land already provides.
Nature-Based Enterprise
Nature-based enterprise ties livelihoods to healthy ecosystems inside each Tapere. Deprivation—scarce jobs, housing stress, thin services—slows circular economies even where biodiversity is high. Reconnecting Northland co-designs ventures that convert cultural and ecological capital into revenue, then helps align investment and fair flows so income supports regeneration rather than extracting from it.
ReVillage Co-Op Enterprises
They are breaking ground on a community-owned enterprise—a public house, marketplace, café, food hub, and small-business incubator—in a long-vacant historic firehouse (once a train station) facing the new town square. The Community Food Hub & Marketplace is underway; a Community Farm Project is funded and launching soon. Each effort is co-created with communities already in place, toward a future in right relationship with land and history. Smaller cooperatives are forming in the ReVillage ecosystem: an intergenerational childcare collective, a local food and land-care initiative, and service ventures emerging through relationships. They are testing income-sharing, cooperative ownership, and regenerative service models that can sustain livelihoods where centralized systems often overlook rural communities. Technical help on legal structure and seed funding for place-rooted enterprises remain needs—the building blocks of a local economy that can support people while regenerating land.
Food Sovereignty and Seed Saving Networks
After Manos Cambiadas, a gap stood out: many farmers could not sell what they grew. They started “Caja Verde,” a community-supported agriculture box; a year later that evolved into Mercado Verde. For over four years they have run a farmers market—200-plus markets—strengthening food sovereignty and security. ReGenerOsa works with farmers, elders, and schools on seed-saving networks, agroecological gardens, and cooperative distribution grounded in local knowledge and biodiversity. Pilot gardens are underway; the collective supports women reclaiming ancestral seed practices and native varieties. Scaling will take resources—more communities, training, and a regional network to link growers, seeds, and markets in a closed loop.
Manos Cambiadas
They launched “Manos Cambiadas,” rooted in an old pattern of neighbors helping neighbors. They worked alongside neighbors on farms and with what people needed day to day. The project continues and has mobilized more than 1,200 volunteers as community members rotate labor across farms.
Forest Regeneration and Cattle Ranching
Ranching and clearing have left pastures prone to drying. The program works with stockmen on regenerative grazing and reforestation, uses ForTerra results on carbon, biomass, and grazing management, and trials rapid tree establishment to recover grasslands, canopy, and biodiversity services tied to rain and storage.
La Arenosa Pilot Site
Work begins on one hectare of pineapple—a stand-in for common practice: bare rows on depleted soil, high erosion, little water holding. The team is shifting the plot toward regenerative management: soil amendments, water retention, agroforestry, and biodiversity buffers, with monitoring of above- and below-ground health, microclimate, and hydrologic response. With ForTerra, they test accelerated soil regeneration mixes and aim for a repeatable measurement stack—ecology, water, and economics—to scale across the basin and inform finance models.
Sustainable Grassland Management
Open habitats cannot be sustained with uniform, industrial mowing. Historically, mosaic grazing and scythe work moved slowly across small parcels—patterns that modern large-field management erases along with specialist species. Bringing animals, shepherds, and patchwise grazing back is central. The team advises and trains farmers on these methods. Reception has shifted from scepticism to curiosity: neighbours now seek them out, reporting clear gains in visible biodiversity.
100 Regenerative Village Program
100 Regenerative Village (100RV) promotes agroforestry and regenerative practices so forests stay intact as water catchments. With Eco-Tourism Bali, hotels and food businesses are nudged toward local, sustainable sourcing—paying farmers who steward forest a credible alternative to selling land for tourism.
Value Chain Collaboration Canvas
VC3 stitches stakeholders so each chain link reinforces the next. In Tabanan, agroforestry cacao growers work with Agridesa on data-backed farming, digital tools, and finance; Cau Chocolates off-takes organic, agroforestry-grown beans. When actors align, projects become investable and finance can follow. Farmers report stronger soils and bean quality plus roughly IDR 10 million extra per harvest cycle—income that helps keep forest on the land, catchments intact, and businesses viable.
Native Crop Regeneration and Supply Chain Development
Wild cacao and wild pepper anchor the model—food and medicine—restoring degraded forest while standing up processing and trade. Early revenue is meant to keep operations on the ground. Economic integration targets agroforestry on an initial ~2,200 ha, processing infrastructure, and a demonstrator that forest-based communities can earn livelihoods while protecting and restoring land. Pepper and cacao are the live cases; a later phase may extend toward ethnobotanical products.
RECenter the Resource Recycling Center San Salvador
RECenter gathers recyclable and repurposable material for the local community and runs education on how everyday choices shape impacts. The project includes machinery to process plastic into blocks and, at the time of documentation, was moving toward acquiring an extruder for further repurposing.
Diamante Luz
The collective describes Diamante Luz as its first on-the-ground node: shared land for permaculture and common resources, where residents, neighbors, and visitors co-create ways of living and working with non-human relations. The site hosts learning for ecological wellness and restoration across ages—spaces for artisans, processing kitchens, syntropic food forests, and support for people stepping into local food leadership.
Regenerative Agriculture Program
The program works through technical schools, pairing demonstration sites, student training, and carbon finance for fences and water. Farms document ~0.5 inch annual soil gain and up to $110,000 first-year income. Trainings include homemade repellents from chile, onion, and garlic so practices stay affordable and ecological. Soil-centered climate work ties to ~150% emissions offset via food—buying time, as Muñoz notes, for better batteries and other hard tech.
Savory Hub Initiative
The Savory Hub work targets 380,000 regional cattle hectares. Farmers who dedicate 15–30% as corridors can sharply raise returns while giving land back to wild connectivity. Large forest patches (over 500 hectares) anchor the map; farms stitch between them. A 40-year initiative with Replanet began at 30,000 hectares with room to grow toward two- to three-hundred thousand hectares via carbon markets, aiming for broad “360” benefits—farm income, carbon, water, and roughly a third of the landscape supporting nature. Regeneration draws on Lacandon practices with balsa and mulch rather than planting full-sun timber rows; it accelerates processes that fit local biology. Insect monitoring showed fivefold insect population gains, with beneficial species dominating pests—work neighbors first read as “crazy.” Bats—about half of local mammal species—signal ecosystem integrity.
Community Food Security Project
When COVID-19 stopped tourism in Guanacaste, Costa Rica Regenerativa mobilized 500 farming families in a belt skeptics had called unsuitable for vegetables. Drawing on Cuban methods and Indigenous growing practices, they rebuilt severely degraded plots—harvesting water, stretching dry-season use, and rebuilding dark soil with carbon and mulch along lines developed over decades by Manders. Harvests came quickly; a mother told him the children’s eyes were shining again and their skin smooth again—something no economic return could match. A simple monitoring scheme used color rings on trees so non-readers could scan farm health at a glance. Cooking workshops helped families accept bitter traditional crops. Food forests followed for easier management and climate resilience. Teenagers—including young women on survey drones—gained skills that could keep rural life viable.
New Revenue Development
Farmers now earn from work the landscape needs: restoring drystone walls (sometimes through local enterprises built around that craft), hosting visitors who want the story from the people who farm the land, and—in Wild Atlantic Nature—paid crews (for example) controlling invasive rhododendron several days a week. Payment is tied to ecosystem services, not only to commodity output—linking income to stewardship and creating rural jobs around that labour.
Farm Infrastructure Support Initiative
Targeted grants fund practical upgrades—stone walls, feeding systems, water management—that lift environmental scores and make day-to-day farming easier. The logic matches the results model: invest where it shifts outcomes, not where it merely ticks boxes.
Results-Based Farming Program
The programme puts a price on good management through results-based payments. A rapid field assessment scores each parcel out of 10 for overall condition—biodiversity, water, soil, invasive pressure, and related indicators. Higher scores mean higher payments. Staff do not prescribe practices; they set targets, and farmers who meet them are rewarded. Poor scores unlock targeted investment—water systems, fencing, feeding layouts—so outcomes can improve over successive seasons. Bureaucracy was deliberately stripped back: the annual farm plan is two pages—a map, the scores, and suggested improvements—plus one signature per year. That lightness helps keep farmers in the scheme and treats them as the main conservation workforce on the ground.
Institutional and Commercial Purchasing
Schools, universities, and hospitals could anchor steady demand for regional farms, but procurement rules, food-safety expectations, and thin coordination often block uptake. The Trust is bundling responses: procurement subsidies that reimburse institutional and commercial buyers for verified local purchases; investment in aggregation and food-safety capacity so farms can meet buyers where compliance is non-negotiable; and digital links between hubs and institutions to cut administrative friction.
WNC Food Hub Collaborative
The WNC Food Hub Collaborative is a newly formed group of 10 participating food hubs across the region that collectively purchase from hundreds of local farms. This existing network of aggregation, storage, and distribution capacity provides the foundation upon which a truly integrated regional food system can be built. The Trust works to strengthen and integrate this local food supply chain, reducing inefficiencies, building infrastructure, and expanding capacity.
Farm Food Access Program
The Farm Food Access Program is the Trust’s lead intervention: it pays farmers for food that is then prepared or boxed for community resource centers across six counties—getting dollars onto farms while feeding neighbors through trusted front-line organizations. The design grew from an eight-week pilot backed by a $1 million American Red Cross grant. The theory of change is straightforward—pay producers first, widen the program, and over time reduce dependence on one-off disaster and charity dollars by knitting in schools, institutions, and households as reliable buyers, supported by storytelling that builds demand for local food. Operations lean on Fastroots, a platform for spotting needs, coordinating resources, tracking impact, and sharing transparent, community-held data.
Regenerative Agriculture Demonstration Network
Demonstration farms knit neighboring holdings into a learning network—sharing practices and materials in place. One early experiment uses waste wool as mulch around aronia berries. The longer-term bet is that these sites become reference points: for farmers trying new crops, for visitors relearning relationships to food and land, and for shifts in what people grow, buy, and expect from the landscape.
Dunhill Ecopark Development Initiative
Dunhill Ecopark is a community-scale hub meant to combine living, working, learning, and enterprise: roughly 38 businesses already operate on-site, with education spaces anchoring how people encounter regenerative agriculture and reflect on environmental, social, and economic impacts together. A planned on-site milk-processing facility would keep more value from regenerative dairy in the territory—linking premium products to fair returns for farmers. The hub mixes earned income, grants, and investment so the site can stay viable while the model is tested at scale.
Sustainable Dairy Index
Building on the FBI system, the team developed the Sustainable Dairy Index, a systematic effort to redefine success metrics in dairy farming by integrating environmental and social returns alongside financial ones. The program introduces frameworks for measuring social contributions, recognizing that when farmers depend on other farmers, they create circular economies and sustainable economies.
Family Land Biodiversity Index
A project involving 43 farmers with the goal of ensuring at least 10% of farmland is dedicated to biodiversity while maintaining farm viability. To this end, they developed the Family Land Biodiversity Index (FBI), a tool designed to reward farmers for ecological stewardship. Unlike traditional conservation schemes that rely on static subsidies for setting aside land, the FBI is a results-based incentive system with four components: biodiversity survey, farm-specific biodiversity plans, annual biodiversity scoring, and results-based payments. The project developed a digital tools to accurately measure space for nature on farms and verify the ecological quality of these areas. The outcomes of the project were exciting. Farmers reported 5–10% revenue increases through diversified income sources, such as agroforestry and eco-tourism. The 43-farm discussion group created a strong social fabric, and even neighboring farms started creating their own habitat corridors. This created biodiversity gains including pollinator population recovery, recovery of ground-nesting bird species, and improved soil health. The FBI model is now being considered for wider agricultural policy reforms at the national and EU level.
Resource Transformation and Material Development
A central focus involves identifying and transforming undervalued resources into valuable products and materials. They work with Mérinos d'Arles sheep wool, exploring natural dyeing techniques and new applications that can reactivate industries and reconnect value chains while avoiding plastics. The organization examines how seeds can be made with rice—common in the Camargue—and explores the leftovers of olive pressing, extruding and mixing them with minerals to create chairs. They investigate salt—one of the most abundant materials in the world—exploring crystallization processes that only use wind and sun to produce wall applications in buildings, valuable for energy-efficient construction. Beyond material development, they create software and documentation for these age-old materials, showing how they can be used in different ways and shared with design communities.
Reforesting Edible Forests
A regenerative food forest project that increases biodiversity while providing economic benefits to 47 communities. The project supports communities while restoring forest ecosystems, creating productive landscapes that integrate food security with ecological restoration.
Regenerative Value Chain Development
The work has developed three regenerative businesses now in operation: an almond-focused company (Almendrehesa), an olive oil cooperative (Habitat), and a food platform (AlVelAl Foods) to sell regenerative products from across the territory. These businesses provide farmers with premium prices for regenerative products while supporting the transition to regenerative practices. 43 locally run businesses have benefited from increased access to new markets and value chain infrastructure, creating economic opportunities that align with ecological restoration goals.
Regenerative Agriculture Machinery Bank
To practice regenerative agriculture, specific machinery is needed, and not all farmers can afford the full range of machines required. Farmers in the area decided to create a community machinery bank, sharing equipment among members. The bank now counts 61 members, demonstrating how resource sharing enables broader adoption of regenerative practices. The cooperative combines equipment access with collaborative learning. They have developed a network for shared farming tips ("truquillos")—those little secrets that farmers share with each other when they have trust and complicity. This approach recognizes that knowledge sharing is as important as resource sharing in building a regenerative agricultural movement.
Regenerative Agriculture Transition
One of the initial goals has been to help align stakeholders and shift from the development of almond monocultures and intensive agricultural and livestock farming practices to mainstreaming regenerative practices and developing the regional market for them. More than 100,000 hectares of rain-fed almonds grow in the AlVelAl Territory, creating huge potential for business-driven restoration. Regenerative techniques are known and work, but cultural adoption is a long-term process requiring patient support and demonstration of both ecological and economic benefits. The alliance backs the transition with education and training, farm-level assessments for farms that want to change practices, research and monitoring to document what works, demonstration farms that show regenerative management in real conditions, and early-transition support so farmers can absorb risk in the first years of change.
Foodshed and Energyshed Mapping
On Mallorca, the alliance has used foodshed and energyshed mapping to trace how food and energy move through landscapes and settlements—mapping relational “footprints” rather than only administrative boundaries. The aim is practical: to surface leverage points for regenerative projects rooted in how the island actually feeds and powers itself.
Regenerative Products & Services Portfolio
A developing line of bioregionally-rooted products including herbal tea blends from native species, guided eco-tourism experiences to restoration sites, and local food products. The products are developed through participatory design processes that integrate community knowledge, ecological criteria, and market opportunities. By creating value chains that circulate benefits within the bioregion, Acción Serrana reduces dependence on external funding while strengthening connections between local communities, ecosystems, and economic opportunities.
Urban-Rural Connection Initiative
The Urban-Rural Connection Initiative creates bridges between urban and rural areas by establishing agroecological stores in urban neighborhoods, particularly in economically disadvantaged areas. Products from ABIF units are marketed directly to urban consumers with prices kept accessible, ensuring that quality organic food reaches communities that might otherwise lack access. Consumers participate in educational programs on traditional food preparation, reinforcing culinary heritage, nutritional awareness, and sustainable consumption habits. This helps maintain traditional food knowledge while building urban-rural connections.
Productive Ecological Landscapes
With mentorship from established members and the broader community, each new family designs a productive landscape that meets their food and income needs while regenerating local ecosystems. These spaces integrate agroecology, fishing, and cultural identity into cohesive socio-ecological systems. Participating households receive multiple forms of support: technical assistance, access to established commercialization networks, guidance in developing auto-sustainable livelihoods, and patient capital when financial support is needed.