Las Cañadas: Growing a Vision Across Southern Mexico

There are some organizations you encounter that change the way you think about what is possible, and for me, Las Cañadas has been one of those places for more than a decade.

Located in the cloud forests outside Huatusco, Veracruz, Las Cañadas has spent more than thirty years experimenting with what it actually means to live within the ecological limits of a place while building a strong, productive, and increasingly autonomous community.

What began on a degraded cattle ranch has grown into one of the most respected examples of regenerative living and agroecology in Mexico. Today, the cooperative brings together ecological restoration, food production, agroforestry, regenerative livestock, seed conservation, ecotechnologies, education, and cooperative stewardship across a living landscape that has been evolving for decades.

But what I have always respected most about Las Cañadas is that the work goes deeper than techniques.

Permaculture ethics and design principles are not something simply taught in a course there. You see them reflected in how the cooperative lives and makes decisions. Waste becomes fertility. Forest conservation supports water and agriculture. Productive systems help support education. Knowledge is shared rather than guarded. People learn from the landscape, and the landscape changes as people learn from it.

There is reciprocity built into absolutely every fiber of what they do. 

Over the years, Las Cañadas has also been an incredible partner to Terra Advocati. Our students and collaborators have learned there, we have brought people into their orbit, and their work has influenced our own thinking about regenerative agriculture and community autonomy. They have also spent decades doing the same for thousands of other farmers, students, organizations, researchers, and practitioners from across Mexico and Latin America.

More than 10,000 people have participated in their courses, workshops, and field schools since 1999. So recently, our conversations with founder, Ricardo Romero, and other members of the Las Cañadas cooperative, have begun shifting toward a different question.

How can we support the work they do, and the world they are building?

That question sounds simple, but I think it is important to get the order right.

It is easy for an outside organization to see good work and immediately start thinking about grants. Where is the funding? What program could we build? What deliverables could we promise? We wanted to understand what Las Cañadas is already trying to do. The whole picture and grander vision. 

In conversations with Ricardo and members of the cooperative, two areas kept rising to the surface. One is an ambitious effort to expand their intensive agroecology training into a farmer-to-farmer learning network across southern Mexico. The other is the continued development of their agroecological coffee operation. At first glance, those may seem like very different projects.

The more we have talked, the more they look like different parts of the same long-term vision.

Taking the FIA Beyond Las Cañadas

One of Las Cañadas' most important educational programs is its Formación Intensiva en Agroecología, or FIA.

The intensive training is built around something Las Cañadas understands exceptionally well. Agroecology cannot really be learned through PowerPoint presentations.

People have to do it.

Participants spend weeks immersed in functioning agricultural systems, learning in the fields and alongside the cooperative members who actually manage them. The model combines roughly 60 percent practical work with 40 percent theory. Agroforestry, regenerative livestock, biofertilizers, seed banking, nurseries, native bees, food processing, soil fertility, and other systems become part of the classroom.

Now Las Cañadas is asking how that experience might travel much farther.

They have been developing the idea of a Farmer-to-Farmer Agroecology Learning Network across southern Mexico, connecting grassroots organizations, Indigenous organizations, farmer groups, cooperatives, universities, and agroecological organizations working in nine states. Veracruz, Puebla, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatán would all be represented.

Importantly, they do not want Las Cañadas to simply decide what everyone else needs.

The first step they envision is bringing representatives of those organizations together at Las Cañadas.

Before the intensive farmer training begins, the organizations themselves would sit together and help shape it. What should participants learn? Who should participate? What knowledge already exists in these territories? What responsibilities should the participating organizations assume afterward? How can farmers continue supporting one another once everyone goes home?

The gathering is key to success. Because the real idea is not to bring people to Las Cañadas, train them, shake hands, take a photograph, and send everyone home.

It is to create a living network.

If each person returns home with stronger skills, applies them on their own land, adapts them to their own culture and ecological conditions, and begins sharing what works with neighbors and other farmers, the knowledge can move organically through communities.

That is a very different model of scaling, and it is also very close to the kind of mycelial weaving we believe in at Terra Advocati.

Building the Network From the Ground Up

There is another reason the initial gathering is so important.

Southern Mexico is not one place. The conditions facing a coffee producer in Veracruz are different from those facing a farmer in Oaxaca, an Indigenous community in Guerrero, or an organization working in the Yucatán Peninsula. Soils are different. Rainfall is different. Crops are different. Cultures are different. Markets are different. Histories are different.

A network like this only has value if those differences are allowed into the room.

Las Cañadas brings more than thirty years of experience, but the participating organizations and farmers bring their own knowledge too. Some of these relationships already go back years. There has been exchange in both directions, including organizations sending people to Las Cañadas for agroecology training and partners sharing their own knowledge with the cooperative in areas such as coffee production and rural health. Other relationships are newer.

That reciprocity is important.

The opportunity is not to replicate Las Cañadas nine times.

It is to connect people who are already doing meaningful work, strengthen their ability to learn from one another, and give more farmers access to practical tools they can adapt to their own territories.

Coffee, Education, and a Longer View

Our other conversations with Las Cañadas have centered around coffee.

This is where the story becomes especially interesting.

Las Cañadas is developing a shade-grown agroecological coffee operation in Huatusco, working not only toward production on its own land but toward a larger relationship with small coffee producers in the surrounding region. The vision includes training producers in agroecological production, processing high-quality coffee, purchasing coffee from local growers at a fair price, and eventually building a much more complete coffee processing and educational operation.

But the coffee itself is only part of the point.

Las Cañadas has spent decades building educational and ecological systems that provide enormous public value. Those systems also cost money to operate.

The cooperative is now thinking seriously about how its productive enterprises can help carry more of that weight.

A stronger coffee enterprise could generate income that helps sustain educational programs, supports continued conservation and restoration of the cloud forest, strengthens the cooperative economically, and eventually contributes toward healthcare for cooperative members as they grow older. Las Cañadas currently has 32 cooperative members, and this question of long-term care is becoming increasingly real.

I find that beautiful.

Regeneration should include people.

If we talk about building systems that can endure for generations, but the people who spent their lives building those systems cannot grow old with dignity inside them, then something is missing. Las Cañadas is thinking much further ahead.

The Next Piece of the Coffee Puzzle

Right now, one of the practical bottlenecks in the coffee operation is relatively straightforward.

They need a dryer.

Las Cañadas has already begun building its coffee production and micro-mill operation. The next important piece of dry-processing equipment is a 10-quintal coffee dryer, which would allow them to process considerably more coffee through their own operation rather than relying as heavily on outside processing.

Las Cañadas ultimately envisions a larger coffee processing facility and coffee school. But rather than trying to build everything at once, the cooperative is approaching it incrementally. Build the production. Work with producers. Improve quality. Remove the next processing bottleneck. Develop the market. Generate revenue. Learn from the process.

Then grow. That is exactly the kind of approach we respect.

So part of our work now is looking at whether Terra Advocati can help Las Cañadas find support for this next phase, beginning with the dryer and the immediate needs around the coffee operation, while understanding where the cooperative ultimately wants to take it.

Asking What Support Actually Looks Like

These conversations have reminded me that sometimes partnership is less about bringing a new idea to the table and more about recognizing the value of something that is already growing.

Las Cañadas does not need us to invent a vision for them. They have one.

They have spent more than thirty years building it, testing it, changing it, making mistakes, learning, and continuing forward.

Our job right now is to listen carefully enough to understand where a little additional support could make a meaningful difference.

Maybe that means helping bring organizations from nine states together so they can shape a farmer-to-farmer agroecology network on their own terms.

Maybe it means helping a group of farmers access an intensive learning experience that would otherwise be financially out of reach.

Maybe it means helping purchase a piece of coffee equipment that unlocks the next stage of an enterprise designed to eventually support education, conservation, local producers, and the cooperative itself.

And maybe, if those pieces are connected thoughtfully, each begins feeding the others.

That is the part we are most interested in.

Not funding projects simply because projects need funding.

Supporting relationships, knowledge, productive systems, and people in ways that allow them to become stronger and more autonomous over time.

We are still listening, learning, and working with Ricardo and the Las Cañadas cooperative to understand what that support could look like.