News 

The predictable rainy seasons in the spring and fall of each year that benefited our region decades ago have been replaced by an unpredictable series of prolonged droughts followed by brief periods of heavy rain. The sugarcane industry that drives the regional economy is experiencing a harvest roughly 70% below the average in recent years due to dry soil conditions.. At the Huasteca Regenerative Agriculture Center we are employing multiple regenerative strategies to assist f

In June, we started the expansion of the vetiver nursery at the Huasteca Regenerative Agriculture Center. We started by trimming the plants in our existing beds to 30 cm.It is recommended that the plants be cut back like this, two to three times within the first year of growth to increase thickness of the cluster, promote side growth, and increase the quantity of tillers that we can later separate. We decide that it is more efficient to plant in ground rows rather than in bed

The Huasteca Regenerative Agriculture Center (HRAC) is poised to demonstrate the multiple uses of vetiver grass, several of which support the center’s focus on regenerative agricultural practices. In conjunction with Terra Advocati and Texas State University (TSU), the center was awarded a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Scientific Cooperation Research Program grant under which we collect research data on the ability of vetiver to reduce the flow of agrochemic

For the second consecutive year, Books in the Barrio partnered with the St. Philip’s College Mexican American Studies Program and the Communications and Learning Department to celebrate Dia de los Niños. This year we hosted children from the St. Philip’s College Child Development Center and Bowden Academy and gave away over 100 copies of the children’s book We Are Water Protectors . Rosie Torres, Virginia Grise, and Excy Guardado led the children through a beautiful reading f

On March 18, 2023 we breathed in a new Spring. We joined the San Anto: Un Taller for Dreaming cohort as they offered seven ways to acknowledge, give thanks to the Land, before we shared a meal and conversation together. We were invited to spend the first 45 minutes of our evening, in a silent walking meditation with Confluence Park, to listen to the Birds, the River, the Water running, the sound of our own Breath and Heart. We were invited to reflect on what we needed to let

The vetiver rows designated for our research project are well established at the Huasteca Regenerative Research Center (HRRC), and data collection is slated to begin in March of this year. Our research will tell us how well vetiver serves as a barrier to erosion and the flow of agrochemicals into the nearby river. Most of the materials and equipment needed to conduct our research are now in place at the HRRC, and practice data collection begins in February. Vetiver is very h