It was the height of the dry season and Martinez’s land was hard, brittle, and gray.

The farm was literally

etched into the mountainside, with a slope so severe that plowing with tractors or animals was
impossible. Yet his storage room was full of maize, beans, dried chili, squash seeds, and fresh fruit that
he’d grown right here.

When I asked how this was possible, Martinez explained that he simply farmed in the manner of his
ancestors, the indigenous Triqui people.

Oswaldo Flores, a Zapotec indigenous man from the village of Yaviche, explained how his community
uses intercropping and agroforestry to grow more food without expanding into new lands.

“The forest pulls clouds from the sky so that they drop rain on the fields below,” Flores said, while
showing me his shade-grown coffee farm.

The farm is a cafetal, a shady, multistory system with tall, purple-podded guajinicuiles and fruit trees
forming the upper layer, coffee trees at the intermediate layer, and smaller food plants and vines (chiles,
chives, chayotes) near the ground. The trees protect the plants below from high winds and cold
temperatures, and their fallen leaves provide a natural compost that inhibits weed growth, adds fertility,
and retains soil humidity. Guajinicuiles also fix nitrogen, making it available in organic form in the soil.
This system of shade-grown coffee is almost equal to the native forest in terms of biodiversity, and
maintains habitat for migratory birds.

At the edge of Flores’ cafetal, the vegetation transitioned to another complex and even more ancient
intercropping system. The milpa is a Mesoamerican technology that integrates maize, beans, squash
and other complementary food crops. While estimates of its age differ, it is at least 3,000 years old. The
intercropped milpa system is multilayered, with maize in the upper canopy, beans in the intermediate
story, and squash at the bottom. Bean plants fix atmospheric nitrogen and help reduce damage caused
by the corn earworm pest (Helicoverpa sea). Squash plants inhibit weed growth with their dense
network of thick, broad leaves and retain soil humidity. Natural chemicals (cucurbitacins) washed from
the leaf surface act as a mild herbicide and pesticide.

Milpa. Photo by Leah Penniman.

Planting different crops together minimizes soil erosion because their roots form a dense network that
holds soil in place. This system also tends to be very efficient, squeezing the maximum value out of every
drop of water, ray of sunlight, and bit of nutrients in the soil. According to studies using the Land
Equivalency Ratio—a way of measuring the productivity of agricultural land—intercropped fields often
yield 40 to 50 percent more than monocropped ones.

H. Garrison Wilkes, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, calls milpa “one of the most
successful human inventions ever created.”

Cropland can expand at low environmental cost if the encroached lands do not have much natural
potential to store carbon or support biodiversity. The arid Mixteca region of Oaxaca meets these criteria
and has been termed an “ecological disaster zone” by the World Bank. Soil erosion and depletion has
damaged about one million acres of cropland, and corn productivity rates have plummeted to the
lowest in Mexico.

Jesús León Santos, sustainable agriculture coordinator at CEDICAM, an indigenous farming organization
in the Mixteca, blames Green Revolution farming technology for the environmental destruction. The
Green Revolution of the 1960s was an U.S.-led international effort to push adoption of farm
mechanization, hybrid seeds, and chemical fertilizers in order to increase yields.

León Santos is working to revive and enhance indigenous farming wisdom in order to restore the health
of the soil and the productivity of the land.

The first step for León Santos and his farming community was to build trenches, stone walls, and
terraces to stop the erosion of the remaining soils and to slow water runoff so aquifers can recharge. He
stabilized these barriers with tenacious local vegetation, such as the sweet-smelling vetiver grass, which
withstands drought, flooding, and mudslides.

Once stabilized, the barren hillsides were reforested with native tree species, like nitrogen-fixing alders
(Alnus acumilata) and pines (Pinus oaxacana). The CEDICAM community saves its own native crop seed,
using an in-the-field selection process that has persisted regionally since the pre-Columbian era. They
preserve and exchange the best seeds of maize, beans, squash, chile, tomatillo, chayote, squash,
sunflower, and prickly pear, as well as local specialties like cempoalxochitl, quintoniles, and huauzontle.

The farmers further improve the soil by planting and tilling in “cover crops,” which add nutrients and
organic matter. Some native varieties are especially good for this, like the “frijol nescafe,” (Mucuna
deeringiana) a nitrogen-fixing bean that thrives in dry soil. Finally, farmers add compost and plant debris
so that the land is finally ready to receive these carefully maintained crop seeds.

The use of erosion control barriers, intercropping, and seed saving are part of the knowledge León
Santos inherited from his Zapotec ancestors. And it’s working. León Santos says he has seen yields
increase fourfold after incorporating these ancient and modern sustainable growing techniques. The
newly established vegetation sequesters atmospheric carbon and attracts biodiversity.

The art of transforming lands of low ecological productivity into thriving foodscapes is not unique to the
Mixteca. León Santos reminded me that the Aztec Empire sustained itself on chinampas, intricate
gardens built of vegetation and river muck, essentially artificial islands constructed in shallow lakes.
Chinampas are widely considered the most productive form of agriculture ever invented, and are so
fertile that they can yield four to seven harvests per year. Indigenous Mexicans have long-standing
successes in positive ecological transformation.