Rancho Regeneración

Círculo

I called the idea Círculo. I wanted a community as regenerative as we could make it: an eco-lodge, homes people could buy, our own food, agroforestry, buildings made from natural and recycled materials, and travelers who came to meet the place rather than consume it. Travelers, not tourists. Food, housing, economy, education and the land itself, all in one circle.

The land turned out to be bigger and cheaper than the agent first told us. From June 2015 we were building out the vision on the ground. Círculo never became one company. It became everything Casa Oro Group grew into, and the farm is where its kitchen scraps still end up.

A well, a road, a bridge

Raw land needs everything before it can grow anything. We dug a well and connected a solar-powered pump. We built the first phases of the road system, a bridge across a ravine, a storage shed and a composting area. We planted two acres of organic, chemical-free food that went straight to the restaurant at Casa Oro.

Then we started taking the town’s waste. We set up a composting and recycling center for what we hauled out of San Juan del Sur, and at the reopening of Casa Oro in January 2017 I asked a room full of neighbors to bring us their garbage: glass bottles, plastic bottles, wine corks, bottle caps, used tires and kitchen scraps. We built walls out of the glass bottles the farm collected, and before long other people in town were building with bottles too. Over those years the program kept more than 10,000 pounds out of the landfill. Today the farm takes the compost: Café Oro’s scraps go up to Rancho Regeneración, and food comes back down.

Trees, turmeric and fruit

Since then: more than 10,000 native trees, a couple of thousand new ones a year, with turmeric and tropical fruit growing among them. It’s agroforestry and permaculture, food grown with the forest instead of against it. The turmeric is an experiment in doing what we do with cacao and coffee: add the value close to where it grows, so more of the work and the money stays near the farm.

The dome

In 2018 I went back to school my way: Bamboo U at the Green School in Bali, then the Earthship Academy in Taos, New Mexico, learning to build with earth, sun and rain. I came home and built a prototype on the ridge: an earthbag dome with earthship systems inside. The structure was finished in June 2019, and the bamboo and furniture inside by early 2020.

It’s an experiment in building that gives back more than it takes. I’m watching how it holds up through the rains, and finding out which pieces belong in whatever we build next on this land.

A private wildlife reserve

The whole property is now registered with MARENA, Nicaragua’s environment ministry, as a private wildlife reserve. In 2015 it was raw hillside.

I’ll be honest about the rest. The farm I bought first has become, in my own words, a bit of a forgotten child. It’s teaching me to be more selective about what I build, and to build the next phase slowly, with the land, not over it.