Stewardship

What matters is the condition of the land, not who owns it. Ecological processes and their impacts do not stop at property boundaries.

The consequences of degraded forests and watersheds are often felt miles downstream, where communities bear the costs of wildfire, flooding, and declining water supplies. Likewise, many of the greatest benefits of restoration accrue not to those managing the land, but to the communities, businesses, and landowners who depend on the health of the larger landscape.

Our approach recognizes these connections and seeks to link the costs of restoration with those who benefit from it. It is intended for degraded, abandoned, or underperforming landscapes where restoring ecological health and productivity requires investment beyond what individual landowners or existing programs can provide.

A high mountain valley of dark conifers and golden aspen above an open meadow, the plains beyond.

Ecological Functions

Fire and drought are breaking this landscape.

Eroded, burned hillside in the northern New Mexico mountains.

Fire

Decades of fire suppression and inadequate forest management have left many forests unnaturally dense and increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic wildfire. Yet the greatest and most lasting damage often comes after the flames are gone, when exposed soils wash away, watersheds deteriorate, and landscapes lose their capacity to recover. An inch of forest soil can take more than a thousand years to form, yet it can be lost in a single intense rainstorm following a fire.

A dry riverbed of cracked sand where a river once ran.

Water

The Sangre de Cristo Mountains are the headwaters of three major river systems: the Rio Grande, Pecos, and Canadian. Together, these watersheds sustain communities, agriculture, and economies across New Mexico and far beyond its borders. Yet decades of forest degradation, increasing wildfire risk, and prolonged drought have undermined their capacity to capture, store, and gradually release water.

System Design

Land, people, and capital, designed as one system.

We begin by understanding the landscape as it is today: its watersheds and groundwater, soils, vegetation, wildlife, and the communities that depend on them. From there, we develop an integrated approach that brings together three interdependent elements: the ecological processes that sustain the land, the communities and governance structures responsible for its stewardship, and the financing needed to support renewal over time.

Field Operations and Contracting

Every job tracked, from crew to buyer.

From forest thinning and selective logging to biomass processing, biochar production, holistic grazing, and watershed restoration, we coordinate the full range of activities needed to renew working landscapes and more functional watersheds.

Equally important, much of the work needed to restore these landscapes can be carried out by the communities that depend on them. Forest thinning, watershed restoration, improved grazing, and biomass processing can support local crews, cooperatives, and businesses.

Cattle grazing in a green mountain meadow beneath forested slopes and a high peak. — Cattle grazing in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a practice that follows centuries of tradition.

A small crew clearing willow and brush along an irrigation ditch below snow-capped mountains. — Cleaning an acequia in the Mora Valley, with the Sangre de Cristo Mountains behind.

Biochar

The way back is known.

None of this depends on unproven technology. We build on decades of experience in forest restoration, wildfire mitigation, watershed recovery, and managed grazing, integrating these established practices with new opportunities to use the resulting biomass productively.

Rather than letting low-value wood and slash decay or burn, we can convert much of this material into biochar through controlled heating in a low-oxygen environment. The result is a stable form of carbon that can improve soil health, increase water retention, and enhance nutrient availability, while also providing valuable materials for water filtration and other industrial applications. Production heat can also be recovered to generate useful energy, creating additional value from material that would otherwise be waste.

By linking ecological restoration with biomass processing and new markets for its products, we can reduce wildfire risk, improve watershed function, restore the productivity of degraded landscapes, and create local industries that generate employment and revenues to help sustain restoration over time.

Value created downstream, reinvested upstream.

Biochar is one component of a much larger effort to restore the landscape while putting recovered materials to productive use. Applied where appropriate, biochar can improve soil structure, increase water retention, and enhance nutrient availability, helping degraded soils recover and supporting the return of more productive vegetation. Combined with forest thinning, watershed restoration, and managed grazing, these interventions can help rebuild the ecological processes that regulate water, sustain wildlife habitat, and reduce the severity of future wildfires.

Some biochar returns directly to the landscape, while other portions can be used as agricultural soil amendments or further processed into filtration materials for municipal water systems. As forests and grasslands recover, habitat for elk and other wildlife improves, while downstream farms and communities benefit from reduced erosion, cleaner water, and potentially more reliable seasonal flows.

The bigger opportunity is to connect these ecological improvements to the economic value they create across the watershed and beyond. Municipalities, insurers, agricultural businesses, and corporate buyers all have an interest in healthier landscapes, more reliable water supplies, and reduced exposure to wildfire and flooding. By measuring these benefits and developing long-term agreements tied to verified improvements, we can create new opportunities for these downstream beneficiaries to help finance restoration upstream.

This shifts landscape recovery from a series of isolated projects dependent on grants toward an integrated regional system in which ecological improvements generate economic value, and a portion of that value is reinvested in continued restoration. Just as importantly, it creates a way for the landowners, local communities, and restoration crews doing the work in the mountains to share in the benefits their efforts generate across the larger watershed.

Three men talking on a gravel yard beside large steel biochar kilns under a cloudy sky. — We are looking to integrate several biochar technologies. Here, team members Stephen Crouch and Gon Zifroni speak with James Gaspard at Biochar Now in Loveland, Colorado.

Monitoring

Land health, fauna and flora.

In collaboration with our local partner, Regional Regeneration, based in Taos, New Mexico, we develop the social and ecological framework for renewing landscapes and communities. Working with our measurement partner, Merge Impact, based in Morris, Illinois, we track ecological recovery through field measurements, biological indicators, and remote sensing.

These include soil moisture and water-holding capacity, soil organic matter, nutrient cycling, nematodes and microbial communities, and acoustic monitoring of returning wildlife. Satellite imagery and water gauges across watersheds and acequia networks provide additional measures of changing landscape conditions.

Combined with locally grounded governance and community engagement, these measurements allow us to document ecological recovery, assess the effectiveness of restoration practices, and adapt management and investment as conditions change. The result is a continuous learning process in which ecological monitoring, community stewardship, and financial decisions reinforce one another, allowing restoration efforts to evolve as the land recovers.

A scientist in the field beside a vehicle under a wide open sky.

A bull elk standing in sunlit grass and juniper.

Pilot Sites

We are beginning with five pilot project sites distributed across a million-acre focal area in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a region whose watersheds feed the Canadian River, Rio Grande, and Pecos River basins. Together, these sites provide an opportunity to demonstrate how forest restoration, watershed recovery, managed grazing, and new local industries can work together to renew landscapes and communities at a meaningful scale.

Wheaton Creek Ranch

Colfax and Mora Counties

A 35,000-acre working pilot combining wildfire treatment, watershed restoration, holistic grazing management, and biochar production.

Raton

Colfax County

A regional innovation hub linking a local sawmill with investment in aerospace and natural-resource industries.

Questa Mine Reclamation

Taos County

Linking reclamation of one of New Mexico’s largest Superfund sites with biochar markets and watershed recovery, together with work with the Carson National Forest under the Truchas-Costilla Active Management Project.

Mora and San Miguel Counties

Watershed and fire restoration across public and private lands above Las Vegas and Mora, coordinated with large-scale thinning already underway on the Carson National Forest.

Las Trampas Land Grant