Maya Mountain Research Farm - Global Ecovillage Network

In 1988, Christopher Nesbitt and family began to transform a degraded citrus and cattle farm into a working multistrata agroforestry system with about 500 species of plants that provide food, fuel, fiber, fodder, timber, marketable and medicinal crops. In 2019, the farm was awarded the Commonwealth’s Innovation for Sustainable Development Award.

The time left to address climate change is diminishing. We believe that this project is one set of coordinated tools to draw down carbon, reduce emissions and contribute to degraded land neutrality that, once demonstrated, will go viral.

Principal access to the farm is by dory via the Columbia Branch of Rio Grande. On the opposite side of the river is the Qu’eqchi Maya Reservation of San Pedro Columbia. In recent years, deforestion and drought in the Guatemalan highlands have begun to forced a large and growing climate migration of Maya across the border into the Southern District of Belize. Many have settled in the Reservation areas and along the river. Pollution from informal settlements is severely impacting the river system and the Great Mayan Reef ecosystem. Upstream fish migrations have been decimated and downstream pollutants are destroying marine biomes. Forests are being felled to grow maize, and careless management practices are depleting fragile soils, reducing biodiversity, and devastating much larger areas through accidental wildfires.

Our approach is to recreate the harmonious agroforestry and carbon farming systems of the original inhabitants, while transforming the region into an ecodistrict, stimulating rural employment, reversing rural to urban migration patterns, empowering women and girls through education, incorporating and facilitating the creation of cooperatives and farmers associations, all while reversing climate change through land use practices and biochar, and eventually, marine applications of mangrove afforestation and coral reef regeneration.