Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin grew up in extreme poverty in the northern rainforest of Guatemala during Guatemala’s brutal decades-long civil war. Shaped by those experiences, he has committed his life to alleviating the conditions that cause suffering by employing his entrepreneurial spirit and regenerative vision to restructure the food system. His vision of regeneration goes beyond merely following a set of practices; it expands the way we view the role of farmers and how we design livestock systems so they are humane and harmonious with the essence of animals’ intrinsic natures.

Reginaldo is the founder of the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance and co-founder and CEO of Tree-Range Farms where he has designed a regenerative poultry operation based on the environmental conditions that poultry had evolved in prior to domestication. In 2018, he was awarded a lifetime Ashoka Fellowship for his work, and he is the author of “In the Shadow of Green Man: My Journey from Poverty and Hunger to Food Security and Hope.”

This article is an edited version of the transcript of a Bioneers Conference presentation by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin.

REGINALDO HASLETT-MARROQUIN: I grew up in extreme poverty, but up to now, my only source of true wealth has come from those conditions that others called poverty. I have always felt like one of the wealthiest people on the planet, not in the way we typically understand wealth, but from the perspective that I am living to the optimal potential that the evolutionary blueprint of the Earth gave me to live with. All the money in the world won’t do that for you. It can only be done from within.

I was raised to think beyond immediate concerns. One of the fascinating things that that does to your mind is that you learn to see things as a whole and think about systems, so I’m not thinking just about a farm or raising chickens. Those are not systems.

The Concentration of the Global Food System

The global food system’s annual sales are somewhere around 10 trillion dollars. At the top there are a small number of corporations that have a controlling share of their sector. Tyson Foods alone controls 75 percent of the poultry sales in this country. Four companies control 75%-90 % of global grain sales. How the heck did we get here? We got here because we gave up ownership, control, and governance of the most important things in our planetary survival system—food and water.

Leaving Guatemala and coming to the U.S., I encountered a massive-scale food system. I studied it thoroughly and looked at every sector: meat in general–beef, pork, poultry– grain, fruits, vegetables, etc. They all exist within a very large pyramid. At the top of the pyramid is a mass accumulation of ownership and control. If you’re going to change a system like that, you have to go back many thousands of years of human history to understand what has worked and what hasn’t. We have to start by going back to the planet’s biophysical and chemical processes that for billions of years have been regenerating and developing life.

Regeneration is How the Planet Operates

It wasn’t Robert Rodale or anyone else who came up with the idea of regeneration. Regeneration is the natural condition of the planet. It’s not merely about practices on the land; it has to do with the whole planet and its ecosystems and micro-climates. To understand regeneration, we need to develop a deep relationship with life and living systems. We have to understand that we don’t just work with nature, we are part of nature. We’re living creatures made out of the elements of the Earth. We are indigenous to the Earth.

There is no one who is not Indigenous to the planet. In saying that, I am making a distinction between being native to a territory and being indigenous to planet Earth.

That is the starting point for regenerative systems thinking. We don’t start with practices on how to farm or raise chickens, though my story happens to be centered on the chicken which are the descendants of jungle fowl. How did I approach raising chickens through the lens of nature’s processes? I placed photosynthesis at the center of the design. Photosynthesis is the primary process of life on our planet in which cosmic energy is turned into very complicated outputs, most importantly glucose, which is considered the molecule of life. Out of that come hundreds and hundreds of carbon-based chains. Life on the planet is made of carbon. That’s the way we should understand carbon, not as a commodity that is traded and offset. Commodifying carbon is actually a form of colonization.

Decoding Nature’s Processes into Farming Practices

The outputs of the photosynthetic process are grasses, leaves, twigs, fruits, vegetables, etc. that are in turn ingested by animals which includes people. That collective chewing process and digestion by animals can be understood as the planet’s digestive tract. The analogy is that each individual is equivalent to one of the trillions of bacteria in our guts.

Energy transformation takes place in three basic layers. First, photosynthesis builds the structure of vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, etc. Then, animals are nourished by those outputs of photosynthesis; that’s the second layer of  the mass-scale transformation of energy. The third layer occurs when animal waste breaks down and feeds the microbiological systems. Those are three places that we can codify the processes of regeneration that have been ongoing for billions of years.

Understanding that permits us to start codifying those processes of nature into farming practices. That understanding is critical to, in our case, producing chickens regeneratively, but I want to be clear: there is no such thing as a regenerative product; there is only the regeneration of systems that deliver energy in expressions and forms assembled in a way that we can harvest as food. But we don’t produce them. We merely take care of a process by which energy went from non-edible to something we can harvest, trade, market and eat.

This is how we approach the process. Of all of the options for animal operations, I believe that we have found one that has the most social and economic alignment with the small global farmers who, according to the U.N., grow 70 percent of the world’s food. There are over 700 million farms that operate with less than 25 hectares. Every one of them can raise poultry. Most of them can’t raise other animals in a way that regenerates ecosystems. That’s why we picked chickens.

If you want to do something regeneratively, ask the species. Ask the oats, ask the trees, ask the chickens. Ask and listen and learn so you can acquire the right knowledge to do things with the Indigenous intellect as opposed to what we have been forced to memorize during the process of domestication that we call education. We have to un-domesticate ourselves and decolonize our minds and our methodology.

We looked to the jungle fowl–ancestors of the domesticated chicken. Jungle fowl and their chicken descendants don’t like to be out in the open where they are vulnerable to predators and where there is too much sun. They are naturally drawn to trees for shade and protection, so if my goal is to use that ancestral blueprint to design a system that will optimize energy transformation, then I have to plant trees. I live in Minnesota, where, as in many other regions in the US,hazelnuts, elderberry, and other similar species thrive.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, chickens and hazelnut trees had a gathering, and discussed their symbiotic relationship. Hazelnut said: “I need a lot of nitrogen to produce nuts.” And the chicken said: “When the hawks and eagles come around, I need a place for protection,” so the hazelnut said: “Unlike our European cousins that created trunks and became trees, we are going to grow like shrubs. We’ll be multi-layered so that we can create 100 percent cover and nothing can see you.”

Hazelnut trees can take up 350 to 400 pounds of nitrogen per acre. Their roots can travel seven-and-a-half feet in every direction. They grow 12-feet high and 12-feet wide, creating a mass-scale network for capturing energy and transforming it into superb nutrient-dense food.

We now have layers of energy transformation. We are learning from the species. We know how to take that information and codify it into agronomical processes, protocols and specifications such as the right density of animals on the land we have. We can figure out how much nitrogen will concentrate in certain areas and then determine how we can spread out the chickens to distribute the nitrogen more evenly so there is no excess runoff and contamination of the groundwater.

We are harvesting the energy–hazelnuts, elderberries, meat, eggs, timber, and non-timber forest products such as mushrooms. Some of the energy, such as the manure and chicken feathers, is not edible. We put those through a process of bio-decomposition that makes super fertilizers that go back into the grain, vegetable, medicinal herb, and agroforestry productions in a circular system.

Building a Model to Scale up for Systems Change

Using an energy-based formula to calculate that circularity, we estimate that on average, we only harvest between 30 to 40 percent of the total energy of the system. The other 60 to 70 percent accumulates in the ecosystem. We call that the regenerative factor. But building just one farm unit, or what we refer to as a “poultry-centered regenerative system,” is not sufficient. If you want to achieve a system level outcome, you’ve got to start thinking bigger than that, so we launched a nonprofit called the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance. We are developing curriculum, coordinating training, and developing teams to do research. All of that allows us to share the model and to contribute to building a regenerative, equitable, and socially just agriculture sector. We are focused on scaling up a systems-level regenerative poultry solution that restores ecological balance, produces nourishing food, and puts money back into the hands of farmers and food chain workers.

And with the nonprofit in place, we were able to buy a poultry processing facility in Iowa and to launch the Tree-Range Chicken brand, which you can now buy anywhere in the country. We also launched a transportation company that takes the chickens from the farms to the processing plant, and we are about to make a decision on whether to build our own freezing facility. We have entered into partnership with the state. They will finance the development of the concept for an industrial park.

With all of these components, we can start playing a little bit of music and directing the orchestra. As more chickens are produced and consumed under this regenerative system based on the ancestral blueprint of the habitat and lifeways of jungle fowl, more farmers on more acreage get involved, more of this regenerative ecosystem is formed, and change is happening faster. We are beginning to take back ownership, control and governance of at least one agricultural sector.

We don’t have to create profit in the way that the colonizing, extractive mind understands it, in which someone gains and someone loses. In the context of the Indigenous way of thinking, profit includes quality of life and regeneration, being part of a community, and having good food and shelter that was paid for as part of the process. That’s how we decolonize profit and change the system. We call that way of thinking an intellectual insurgency.

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