Fire, water, jobs.
Northern New Mexico.
Fire and drought are breaking this landscape.
Fire
Years of fire suppression and limited management have left forests overly dense and highly fire prone. The lasting damage is not the immediate effect of the fire itself but what follows it: erosion and degrading landscapes. It takes over a thousand years to build an inch of forest soil, and that inch can be lost in a single rainfall event.
Water
The Rio Grande is the lifeblood of New Mexico, and it no longer reaches the length of its own channel. Stretches through Albuquerque have run dry in 2022, 2025, and 2026, and long reaches south of the city, in Valencia and Socorro counties, dry every summer. The goal of our long-term work is a free-flowing Rio Grande, which reduces impacts downstream not only for Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but for Texas under the interstate compact and for treaty obligations to Mexico.
The work it takes stays in the county: forestry crews, a local cooperative, a biochar operation, and Raton’s idle sawmill brought back as a regional biohub.
The cost of getting this wrong runs into the billions.
Federal restitution for the last fire alone reaches that far, and one of the largest wildfires in the country’s history struck elsewhere in the West only last year. These mountains feed the Rio Grande for two states, and the farms and cities along it depend on what happens up here.
These mountains are the next basin.
New Mexico holds the second largest sovereign wealth fund in the United States, built on Permian oil. The Rio Grande is fed by two ranges, the Sangre de Cristo and the San Juan. These mountains are the next basin. They are ours to lose.
The way back is known.
And none of it depends on new technology. We build on the fire work New Mexico’s State Forestry has pioneered: thin and clear the overgrowth, turn the low-value wood into biochar, remodel the land to hold water, and bring back managed grazing.
The carbon goes back into the soil.
The biochar goes back on the mountain, where it holds water, rebuilds soil, and takes the heat out of the next fire. Farmers get affordable soil inputs. Towns downstream get cheaper water filtration media. Elk habitat widens. Corporate buyers pay for outcomes they already depend on. Work high on the mountain lifts value all the way down the valley.
What we put together.
Bringing this land back takes more than crews and equipment. It takes a financial structure built to carry the years before the land can pay for itself, insurance against the things that actually threaten it, and software to run the whole thing as one system.
The capital stack
First-loss transition capital carries the early years, when the work is underway but nothing is producing yet. A long-term bond refinances it once the land is productive. Institutional capital takes the durable position after that. Each layer is sized so the early risk sits with the parties built to hold it.
The risk tower
A parametric insurance tower protects the project against the perils that actually threaten this landscape: fire, drought, and the loss of water. We do not just insure against them. The work on the ground reduces them, and lower risk is what makes insuring a whole landscape possible in the first place.
The software
LandStack runs the field operations, the logistics, and the underwriting as one system, so every party financing the work is reading the same ground truth at the same time.
Measurement and verification
Every intervention and its effect on the land is measured continuously, before the farm gate, by our partner Merge Impact: from the thinning crew through the biochar to the water held in the soil.
Scenario modeling
Before any capital commits, we run the landscape forward under different fire, water, and market conditions, so the people putting money in see the range they are stepping into, not a single hopeful line.
Run together, these keep capital and people moving in step with the work, right across the landscape.
See LandStack
Ecology, and relationships, across cultures.
Bringing land back is as much about people as it is about ecology. Our chief scientist spent decades on exactly this across the Malpai Borderlands and the Blackfoot Challenge, getting ranchers, agencies, scientists, and communities who rarely agree to work the same ground. The same holds here, where families have cared for this land for four hundred years.
One table.
Communities, counties, the state, insurers, and corporate buyers sit at one table, a regional partnership called Sierra del Norte, public and private together. The work lowers the hazard at its source. Sovereign Land takes no equity, no title, no lien. Ownership and governance stay local. And the families who have cared for this land for four hundred years hold a share in what it produces next.
We are assembling the capital to break ground across the first sites.
If you invest in this kind of infrastructure, build it, or govern the land it serves, we should talk.
Talk to us.Regional Theses
Ogallala Aquifer
Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas
Across the High Plains, an aquifer that took millennia to fill is being drawn down faster than it can recharge, and invasive growth pulls vast quantities of water out of the ground that no one is paid to remove.
The same logic that drives New Mexico applies here: clearing that growth returns water and yields biomass, and the two together make the work pay for itself. A county-level model built to repeat across the eight Ogallala states, anchored where Nebraska, Colorado, and Kansas meet.
Iberia
Huelva, Algarve, Alentejo
Abandoned and degraded Mediterranean land across the Huelva, Algarve, and Alentejo corridor sits in fragmented private hands. No single owner is large enough to draw institutional capital, and no parcel can justify the cost of transition on its own, so the land sits idle.
Our intended first deployment in Europe. We aggregate those parcels into one investable program and finance the transition before the land can stand behind it, the same infrastructure proven in New Mexico, fitted to private ownership rather than public land. EU institutional finance is the intended capital base.
Brazil
National transition credit
Brazil has built some of the most favorable credit in the world for landscape transition: long tenors, multi-year interest-only grace periods, soft rates. But the money is so soft and the tracking so thin that the principal never gets retired and no one can confirm the transition is holding. Capital parks, and the commitment never becomes change on the ground.
We are the operational layer that ties that capital to verified field work and holds it to outcomes, so soft money turns into transitions that close.
Taiwan-France
Rural France, demand from Taiwan
French farming is among the most subsidized in Europe, and yet drought, floods, and failing soil keep hitting rural communities while the support from the state shrinks. They need revenue that does not depend on Paris.
The earliest of these. We are exploring two routes at once: connecting local output to secure, long-horizon demand abroad, and building local supply of organic soil amendments, so value cycles inside the rural economy instead of leaking out of it.