Notes from the Field: Connecting with the Heart and Soil of Regeneration in the Thale Songkhla Watershed

September 30, 2022 by admin

By Michael B. Commons

Introduction

In March, 2022, a group consisting of team members from Terra Genesis and VF Corporation had the chance to visit with the farmers who have been leading the way in regenerative rubber-sourcing efforts. We were deeply excited to connect with the people and the forest garden systems in the south of Thailand where the magic had been happening for so long.

Day 1: Out in the forest gardens, we had the opportunity to connect with and learn from the farmers in rubber agroforestry systems that integrated rubber agriculture with features including hardwood trees, herbs, fruit trees, and even bee colonies. The elements were with us as well, as we found to be true throughout the journey.

Day 2: We began our way to the whole watershed and bioregion of Thale Songkhla by heading to Lad Toey Waterfall in Tamot district. The waterfall and its adjoining forest are managed by the community in partnership with the forest department. I did my best to translate this useful context for anyone nearby, however the voices of the trees, the plants, the birds, and the butterflies needed no interpretation.

As we approached Thale Noi, our conductors suggested we take cover under the bridge ahead and wait out the dark looming clouds before us. Families of buffalo grazed on the islets nearby, fully in their element. Water buffalo are much loved by Thai people. In fact, they are symbolic of Thai farmers because they historically play a direct and critical role in helping prepare the lands for rice planting.

We opted to make a quick cycle through part of Thale Noi to see some of the beds of waterlilies and abundant waterbirds before heading back to escape imminent showers. We got a proper soaking, as we were not well-prepared with rain gear, but when I finally arrived on the last boat, I discovered the team huddled up in laughter enjoying a drink. The team from VF was truly living the message shared by their brands of getting out into nature, and in touch with the adventure of connecting with each other and the planet.

Day 3:

We were welcomed to the home of Chawapon Omreuang, the former head of Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives for the province of Phatthalung, who has been practicing and studying rubber agroforestry for over 20 years. His in-laws, who he shares the space with, welcomed us with traditional desserts and snacks made entirely from their own organic ingredients and traditional recipes. Then the governor of Phatthalung, who had set a vision to make his province fully organic, and his team joined for some exchange between our parties, under a common vision and goal of regeneration.

After the exchange with the governor, the guests were invited to visit their gardens, including a rubber forest garden, a “Som Rom” fruit forest, and Chawapon’s herd of traditional local variety cattle. In the afternoon we returned to Tamot and were received by Chorthip Prabpree and Vitoon Noosen (who is called Loong Vitoon by those who know him), two amazing farmers whose rubber agroforestry systems are among the most lush and impressive.

In the afternoon, we visited Chorthip Prabpree’s rubber forest garden behind her home, grown on land she purchased herself with the intent to grow a forest. Her courage and initiative to obtain her own land and grow a forest in the way she feels is right gave us a glimpse of the abundance and joy one can find in such a relationship with nature. For example, she ignores conventional ideas of planting ratios and popular conceptions of what may work here or there, instead welcoming in and allowing the plants and trees to teach and show her what they can do.

Next, we visited the farmer elder Loong Vitoon in his rubber agroforest, which is no less impressive. His system is called “Buddhist Way of Farming. ” He explains that at the core, healing the earth and the planet is a journey to heal ourselves, our spirits, and our beings. Thai Buddhist tradition has a long tradition of community members building forest monasteries and spending time in the forest to connect with the Dharma, which has the same root word in Thai as nature (“Thammachat” being the state of dharma). For Loong Vitoon, and other leaders in this movement, connecting with and healing natural environments including forests is key to realizing the truth.

As conscientious consumers, we must ask questions like “what is rubber made from”, “where does rubber come from?” and “where do rubber trees grow?” to understand the impacts from the products we make, buy and use. Exploring the magnificent diverse rubber forests of Chorthip and Loong Vitoon and connecting with small-holder rubber farmer groups, we see very different systems and relationships than that which most people know as “rubber plantations”.

Day 4:

The agroforestry rubber farmers of Tamot hosted a Regenerative Rubber Summit, which was attended by a number of agroforestry farmer groups who joined to share and exchange knowledge, seedlings and products for their systems.

After the opening, four parties ceremonially signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which expresses a vision and intention of collaboration in support of the transformation of the whole province of Phatthalung to regenerative and organic systems. Those parties included: Thakin University, Phatthalung, which has a long history of research and work on rubber agroforestry; the Governor of Phatthalung, who signed on behalf of the provincial government; Tim Tensen, who, in his capacity as Chief Innovation Officer, signed on behalf of Terra Genesis; and Chorthip Prabpree, who signed on behalf of the region’s rubber agroforestry farmers.

On behalf of VF Corporation, Director of Global Material Supply Jon Hopper shared a message of support for this effort and of the company’s intent to shift the source of key materials, including rubber, to regenerative systems. At this event, we had the privilege to see the key pieces come together under a developing partnership that was building on a farmer-led movement and already activating a wider shift to regeneration.

We tangibly felt that this could spread to encompass this province and watershed with wide-reaching positive effects on the ecology, microclimate, culture, and communities. Throughout the rest of the day, attendees explored these possibilities in speaker sessions, starting with Thailand’s own Jon Jandai, while more informal exchanges continued at different farmer groups’ booths.

The event was punctuated by a Manora performance– a traditional and enduring performing art with a 1200-year lineage. Its story connects to the story of Phatthalung and its watershed. The eponymous Manora are celestial beings that live in the palaces near Songkhla lake surrounded by rice fields and sugar palms. The tradition speaks of 1200 years of abundance from such relationships and care, which has been damaged and degraded, but joins participants together in a movement to heal.

Conclusion

The summit was a point of transformation for many of us, as we were transformed by this occasion of being connected with regeneration as a lived and living experience. The dream of regeneration has been held and practiced by inspiring farmer leaders including Chorthip and Loong Vitoon for many years, but even as recently as when Governor Kukiat began assembling the team and policy needed to transform his province in 2019, there was not the needed support from market or trade partners. Now the farmers and local leaders have seen and met with industry leaders who recognize and value regeneration, and who started to source rubber from these very regenerative agroforestry rubber systems for their product lines. They do so because the world needs this, because their brands help people connect with nature and the planet, and because their customers care. The signing of the MOU represents the fact that all of the pieces are now present and we are working to realize this collective dream of a new kind of rubber industry together.

Reimagining Dominican Republic Tourism: Site Visit to Ecotourism Project in Las Terrenas, DR

September 25, 2022 by admin

By Dennis Posthumus

What’s the Story?

In recent months Terra Genesis has been working with Nacozia, a client in the Dominican Republic who is developing a real estate and tourism project informed by a regenerative design process. Tourism can create jobs and lift people out of poverty, but conventional development projects can cause significant harm to the environment, as well as disrupt the economic and social fabric of a place. Together we have embarked on a journey to better understand the social context and cultivate a deep understanding of the landscape.

One of the overarching visions for this project is to create an ecotourism example that can inspire others on the island and model different ways to develop land as it enriches the local culture and economy. What follows is an anecdotal account of the insights that came from developing the beginnings of a regenerative developmental process with Nacozia, from the perspective of walking the project site and experiencing the landscape intimately firsthand.

*The Haitises: a truly unique landscape in the Dominican Republic*

Context

The Dominican Republic has had the fastest-growing economy in the Caribbean for many years. Increasingly, tourists have been drawn to the pristine beaches, laid-back lifestyle, and kind people of the Hispaniolan island. The country is accessing much of its economic and social potential, which, in many cases of touristic development, unfortunately leads to generic developments and an under-attended consideration of the uniqueness and essence of the place and culture.

*Luxury resorts and other generic approaches to develop places: the monocultures of the built environment*

However, there is a growing movement of people throughout the Caribbean (including in the DR) who are pursuing innovation and development in both regenerative agriculture and tourism offerings. These alternative developments, which tend to gather around places like Las Terrenas (a small town in the northeast of the island), aim to be more environmentally conscious and socially engaged than a traditional ecotourism example.

Las Terrenas lies on the peninsula of Samaná province. It is part of a unique type of ecosystem called the Haitises, which translates loosely as ‘hills’ in the native indigenous Taíno language, and is the origin of Haiti, the DR’s twin half of the island. The Taíno are one of the original peoples of the island of Hispaniola and form a large part of the roots of its rich cultural heritage. The Taíno called their island Kiskeya, meaning “mother of all lands”, and have been the stewards of the Kiskeyan landscape for centuries. They developed many methods and techniques of working with the environment to create sustainable food production systems, water systems, shelter, clothes, and many other technologies that make their daily lives more comfortable and rich. In fact, the English language contains many words derived from Taíno culture, including barbecue, hammock, canoe, maize, and tobacco; indicative of the depth, relevance, and lasting influence of the culture even in modern times.

As in many other cases in which we seek sustainable and regenerative ways to work with the landscape, we trace back to traditional indigenous methods for vital knowledge and insight. Although we might think that our modern ways are superior, traditional ways have often been developed and honed over centuries of trial and error and, importantly, adapted to the specificity of the local context. That context includes any of the conditions that make a place unique, including climate, geology, flora, fauna, etc. The bioregion of the Haitises has its unique features as well, and understanding those is crucial when we want to evolve a project in the landscape that is appropriate, and builds on the potential inherent to a place.

*Artist impression of idealized Taíno village from: hablemosdeculturas.com*

The Haitises

We completed a preliminary site survey of the property in March of 2022, before undertaking significant landscape design work and research remotely over the next month. We used this time to learn important elements of the area’s ancient history— and current status.

The Haitises form a unique kind of landscape with a high density of conical hills, which are the remnants of precipitated diatoms, marine life, and coral reef beds that formed millions of years ago and have since been eroded by oceanic wave dynamics, receding sea levels, and weathering from rainfall. The geology is predominantly composed of limestone, which in turn gives rise to specific soil conditions, including high porosity and percolation rates.

The particular type of limestone formations in the Haitises lead to what is called a Karst geology, characterized by caves, underground streams, caverns, and other peculiar geological formations such as sinkholes. An ecological consequence of the high porosity of Karst limestone formations is that despite the high amounts of precipitation, plants need to cope with a low capacity of the soil to retain moisture. As a result, it is home to a unique type of tropical forest ecology that tolerates a certain degree of drought, and thrives on calcium-rich high-pH soils.

*View from one of the main hills of the project site. Note the yellow jeep center right for scale.*

In reality, much of landscape design can be accomplished remotely, but to actually know and understand a landscape, it is fundamental to visit the site, talk with the community and stakeholders, and cultivate a firsthand experience. Fortunately, we had the opportunity to visit the site with a larger team the following month. This visit would yield crucial insights and emphasized the necessity of physical presence when designing a landscape, and allowed us to confirm and rethink certain design decisions.

Topographical Analysis

Much of our understanding of the landscape was informed by online research, dialogues with the client and locals, geological surveys, topographical maps, and the plethora of data that are digitally accessible. When we analyzed the landform of the project site from topographical surveys, we quickly noticed the dramatic contrast between steep hills and valleys, with no significant stretches of flat land in between. This is significant because, given that function largely follows landform, the topography of the landscape significantly dictates what we could expect to accomplish.

For example, with the extremes of elevation and lack of flat areas, a focus on annual vegetable production is unlikely. On the other hand, forestry systems thrive on slopes, and play a crucial role stabilizing hilly terrain. To make matters more complex for our context, the project is looking to develop different types of shelter and constructions, which is simpler and more intuitive on flat land, but exponentially more difficult and costly as the terrain becomes steeper.

The various types of topographical analysis we completed in advance of our visit helped shape our understanding of the opportunities and constraints that exist in the landscape. However experience tells that the most meaningful and distinctive discoveries are made while surveying the site, and being physically present. We were looking forward to being surprised, and understanding better what we had missed from just staring at the screen. With all this in mind, I made my way into the hills, along with my colleagues Chris, Øystein, and Robbe– and a Jeep.

Observations

The first major insight of the visit managed to arrive before we did; the path to the land meandered far more than I realized, and made it tougher to access than we had anticipated. I knew from the topographical maps that the access to the land would only be partially tarmac, but I had not considered the extent to which the arrival experience would determine the experience of the place. Clearly, while studying the site on a screen, my focus had zeroed in on the site itself and it would take until I was hurled around in the Jeep and trudging through the brush to recognize the opportunities that arose from a sense of remoteness, and the constraints presented by the difficulty of access

*Robbe, Dennis, and Øystein from TGI descending one of the conical hills overlooking the valley*

I was struck by a sense of awe from how majestically these 50-meter-tall conical hills rise up from the landscape. The 18-hectare property is a complex of five hills surrounding a central valley that slowly rises southeastward between the hills and transitions into a smaller secondary valley, which wraps all the way around one of the bottommost hills on the property (see image below).

*Five hills surrounding a central valley*

A property this large is obviously impossible to survey in its entirety, or to fully understand in a short amount of time, but I quickly realized that, while we had obviously taken the importance of slope in this landscape into account when creating the initial designs, experiencing the pervasive steepness in this landscape really brought into focus its pivotal role in this landscape. It determines so many things: the experience of place to the functional use of landscape units, the constraints and opportunities for development, the importance of well-graded paths and channeling water flows, and the placement of construction and production areas.

As our walk took us from the valley up to the hilltops, there were distinct zones characterized by varying degrees of humidity accompanied by changes in wind movement. At times it felt like I was wading through hot, still-standing, dense pockets of air, only to emerge from those into higher lying more exposed areas with a persistent cooling breeze. As I walked, climbed, rested, and observed these changes, I couldn’t help being constantly aware of the perpetual interplay between natural factors such as wind, humidity and sunshine, and the shape of the land. This gave rise to a patchwork of microclimates that followed a dynamic patterning process, and these patterns revealed much about how these areas could be experienced and what role they might play in the design of the site at large.

It struck me that even though digital topographical analysis can model and visualize much of the complexity of a site, and lead to rational inferences and conclusions, it is really just a supplemental tool to a much more nuanced process, one that involves being on-site, experiencing the landscape, and being open to let it communicate with the imagination. The senses mediated by consciousness have an uncanny ability to recognize patterns that characterize a landscape, and being on-site in this way leads to profound insights about user experience and the inherent potential that could arise from deepening an understanding of the landscape.

*These hills are more than 50 meters, or 150 feet high. Note the yellow Jeep center right*

The Stakeholder Pentad Reveals Insights

The site visit sparked interesting and intense exchanges, mostly centered around reconciling the needs of the client with what the landscape is telling us. We sought to understand the role of the project in the context of the wider environment (ecologically, socially, and economically) and worked together to challenge the role that regenerative design and development play in this context.

We slowly arrived at a common ground that reconciled all our perspectives, although the process did not end there. In fact, working with a regenerative design process enabled us to recognize that designers and clients are really just two stakeholders in a larger web of actors. The Stakeholder Pentad™, developed by the Carol Sanford Institute illustrates how different stakeholders work together to drive the evolution of a system.

*The Stakeholder Pentad™ helps us think about all the actors in a project*

This teaches us that we need to engage and take into account the needs of not only the client, and their investors, but also that of the landscape, all living beings that share life in that place, and the community at large. Understanding the landscape better is a much more complex process than just examining topography, slope, and elevation— it becomes a process of having conversations with many stakeholders, and facilitating a process by which the various points of view can be reconciled into an ongoing synergistic process. Working regeneratively in that sense extends far beyond ecology, plants, soils, and hydrological processes, into a realm that is about playing an active role in evolving social relationships for the benefit of a greater whole.

*Getting to know the land and the locals: Pablo showing Chris the land during the first site visit*

To that end, part of our work has consisted of a developmental process with our client, to give them the tools to engage with stakeholders in this fashion, to empower them with the ability to co-evolve their project with their community and the environment, and slowly make ourselves redundant in the process. What started out with a landscape design turned into first steps toward community engagement, a shift from thinking about what is wanted to what is needed. Demonstrating that regenerative development is a process of being present, observing, listening, understanding where you are, and how you might integrate in a meaningful way.

Many months later, when we heard that the client had started to engage with the local youth and learn what their aspirations were while trying to understand what role they might play in the community, we felt gratified knowing that we had done our job well.

Regenerative Development

Regeneration is becoming a more and more ubiquitous term, although it’s not always clear what is meant by it. Consumer goods and apparel industries have increasingly included regenerative agriculture in popular discourse in recent years. In a way, regeneration is an old phenomenon with new connotations and relevance. As an old phenomenon, it is part and parcel of the way that people have long been integral to the landscape, have venerated nature as a precious giver of all that humans needed, and stewarded the land. As a new movement, it is part of our journey of reinventing ways to relate with our natural environment, and the communities in which we reside. To accomplish that, we need to be physically present, be responsive with all our senses, and relearn how to see and interact with our environment. We need to engage in conversation with all those involved, including nature, and collectively develop a notion of what it means to regenerate life in the places of our respective little corners of the earth.

Notes from the Field: Fine-tuning the details at Lake Wallace Sensory Trail as its first visitors arrive

September 9, 2022 by admin

By Andrew Kilduff

Lake Wallace Sensory Trail, Belchertown, MA

After staring at one of the braille signs for a minute, I decided to move it about twenty feet from where we’d originally set it. It may seem trivial, but the experience of “feeling” the landscape in a precise way is crucial in this regard; when one can “feel” where a headwater begins— and how the rest of the site is influenced by this hydrological feature— the image of the landscape becomes all the more clear. What emerges is a unique language of this landscape, place, and community.

I’ve been living with the Lake Wallace Sensory Trail project for over five years, which accounts for my deep level of connection with the area’s particularities. I had just finished a graduate program in ecological design at The Conway School when my work partner Tim and I (under the heading of TK.designlab) were approached by Doug Albertson, the town planner in Belchertown. In the years to come, we would become very familiar with the half-hour drive between our homes, in Northampton, and Lake Wallace, and get to know the community and its interests. Our little company was acquired by Terra Genesis and our careers evolved accordingly, but we carried the project forward and I continued the work of conceiving and realizing our project. Building the trail would prove to be as much a study of place and community as it was an exercise in ecological design.

Belchertown community enjoying the new sensory trail.

In order to get a deep understanding of place and community, we facilitated many conversations with community members, especially public meetings at town hall. There, the loudest voices were often dissenters who were reluctant to see resources committed to a project that they didn’t regard as valuable to them or their community. “Who’s going to clean it up?” “I don’t want too much stuff here.” “Where’s the money for this coming from?” In response, I found myself overcommitting, as if the success of my work would prove and insist on the value of the trail. I did my own research in order to learn more about the community and their values, and the ways in which they were already building towards and investing in itself.

A guide explains features of the Lake Wallace Sensory Trail project to community members.

Now it’s 2022, and the nature of my role has had me mostly office-bound for the last year, separated from traditional client work and site visits. The trail’s construction has continued a predictable timeline, and I’ve had the luxury of being able to trust the very reliable contractors to complete the direct construction work without my needing to be directly supervise. In fact, the build was constantly ahead of schedule. Naturally, the chance to return to on-site work was deeply enticing to me– and the conclusion of the first major phase of construction offered a long-awaited chance to emerge from my remote-work “hibernation” period.

In June, I returned to complete some last-minute inspections, and was surprised to find so many members of the community experiencing the place already. Most projects are not “realized” by the community until after they are completed, but this project has been seen/known by the community for several years, and the excitement of watching it realized seems to have permeated throughout the neighborhood. On the days I was there, several residents came back nightly, asking questions about the recent and upcoming features. It was deeply motivating to watch as the concept I held in my mind for so long become embedded in the experiences of people I’ve never met– birders stepping over “caution” tape to snap a picture of a hooded merganser, couples going for a romantic stroll, children scrawling hopscotch grids onto the asphalt. One local said to me, “I can’t wait for me and my wife, who is in a wheelchair, to use this path for our walks.”

A wide path at Lake Wallace Sensory Trail

Despite the fact that it’s unusual for a designer/manager to tend to high-level details directly, I found that, for my two weeks in the area, I was compelled to endure the blasting sunlight and 95-degree days to continue tinkering into the evening on key features like braille signs, directional markings, and learning stations. I often made subtle changes to the placement of these features so they most-closely aligned with the desired experience of the user. Even though we’ve wrapped up most of the last details, it remains to be seen how others will experience this site, but we’re motivated by the fact it will expand and evolve over time. Memories are already making their way into conversations over the kitchen table, in classrooms, and during evening walks. As I see it, direct engagement of the landscape is how a designer can evolve both how a community sees itself, and its relationship with a place.

For the most part, things went smoothly– a tribute to our team’s careful planning and thoughtful consideration. I gave myself wiggle room within the design so that its elements invited continued evolution– and so that small surprises would not become insurmountable obstacles. Naturally, and because I afforded myself the luxury of time, I’m taking advantage of that opportunity to make subtle alterations to the design in order to match the desired conditions of the user experience. Now that the community can see and experience the trail, the self-selecting neighbors who are motivated to visit and engage with the trail remind me that there is a group of community members who will commit in ways that their concerned neighbors might not– and my role is to seek out the former group so they can lead the way for their “constituents”.

I think this is why I felt so liberated when I worked on this trail last month. It will always be a work in progress, but it has a clear direction: to consistently represent a shared community vision. Because I can focus on culminating the ideas and commitments of others, I manage to avoid the pitfall of treating it as a personal assignment that requires me to conceive everything in isolation.

View of Lake Wallace from the Sensory Trail

Designing the Most Regenerative Coffee Production System in the World

August 5, 2022 by admin

Don Pedro and nitrogen fixing beans in the field.

Sometimes I wonder how often I’ll say to new and old friends “Let’s get together for a cup of coffee!” It’s an automatic and generic question, but transformative dialogues and ideas can emerge over this beloved beverage.

New insights about coffee brewed during a scope of work involving two leading players in the coffee industry: Mercon Coffee Group (one of the leading ‘green’ coffee suppliers in the world) and Lavazza (the well-known Italian coffee brand). This pair of companies engaged Terra Genesis to develop regenerative coffee cropping concepts for the coffee farms they source from in Nicaragua. Their joint goal is to build and maintain a low-carbon, resilient, and high-performing coffee supply system, because they recognize that the economic and climate resilience and well-being of their farmer partners is their strongest asset in ensuring long-term supply. The primary goals of our project with them were to support the design and implementation of regenerative agroforestry practices on coffee farms, to diversify coffee growers’ incomes, and to improve their climate resilience.

We set out to design the most regenerative coffee production system we could imagine, but by the end of the project we came to ask ourselves how the popularity of “sustainable coffee” itself can become a vehicle for regeneration in the world.

The urgency and significance of the work did not escape us as we began. Coffee is increasingly making news headlines as a much-loved global commodity that is particularly vulnerable to changing climate conditions. Rising temperatures are predicted to make many current coffee-producing regions drastically less suitable for coffee cultivation, and reduce suitable areas for growing coffee by up to 50% by 2050. Add to that the compounding crises of volatile coffee prices and increasingly degraded farm ecosystems and soils that impact the 25 million growers in the world, who are mostly smallholder coffee farmers in the global south.

The result is a perfect storm in the coffee industry.

Cuttings are used to cover ground, Farm Felipe, Nueva Guinea

A Nodal Intervention

As we began our collaboration, we recognized that a complex, “wicked problem” such as this requires a nodal intervention– a strategic move that simultaneously addresses multiple challenges while also opening up new, previously unseen possibilities. To that end, we set out design a coffee cropping system that would yield many positive outcomes including:

Decreased dependence on chemical inputs
Increased resilience and adaptability to changing climate conditions
Increased biodiversity
Captured carbon, mitigating the total climate footprint of the coffee produced
Increased production of other crops to diversify farmers’ incomes

While this sounds like a lot to manage at once, we assured our partners that coffee agroforestry (the production of coffee in shaded, highly diverse polyculture systems) could support achieving all of these goals simultaneously.

For example, dependence on chemical inputs can be reduced by focusing on building ecological health. Added biodiversity naturally attracts birds and other other natural predators of common coffee pests, including the coffee borer beetle. It also nourishes soil and adds sources of biological nutrients into the system (green manures, biomass plants, nitrogen fixers). Meanwhile, agroforestry (a farming method that prioritizes the proliferation and cultivation of trees) also helps with climate change adaptation, because the shade from woody species protects the coffee plants from excess heat, and root systems along with heavy mulches make the soils less susceptible to erosion and water evaporation.

Agroforestry has also been consistently demonstrated as one of the most promising strategies for increasing carbon stocks and carbon sequestration on agricultural land. Lastly, diverse coffee polycultures incorporate innumerable staple foods, local marked crops, high-value export crops, and other beneficial species that can help to diversify farmers’ diets and incomes. This positive impact represents a more ambitious goal than a term like “equal exchange coffee” seems to suggest.

Learning from the Coffee Growers

When our team member Chris Kaput traveled to Nicaragua to visit the coffee farms Mercon and Lavazza source from, he quickly learned that many of the coffee farmer leaders were already pioneering and experimenting with coffee polycultures. Our final cropping concepts integrated elements of what they were already developing, such as growing lines of corn and other annual staples between the coffee bushes, or incorporating woody crops including cloves, bananas, and cacao into the coffee production system.

While presenting our draft cropping concepts to the farmers and Mercon’s on-the-ground technical assistants, we had the chance to collect and incorporate their feedback. In a very real sense, then, our team was co-designing the cropping concepts with the coffee growers, drawing on their invaluable experience and knowledge. The result is a program that seeks to go beyond the claims of “fair trade coffee” or “ethically sourced coffee”– and towards the potential for the crop to contribute to a positive environmental impact.

Regenerative Coffee is a Journey

Even though Mercon and Lavazza have made tremendous progress and had real successes while pioneering the initiative they embarked on, regenerative cropping practices exist as continuums, and they will always have further to go on this journey.

This cropping concept design work our team did serves as a launchpad for their development as they set a new standard for what regenerative coffee can be. Borrowing Mercon’s tagline, we envision a “better coffee world” in which coffee is produced in a way that generates and promotes ecological, social and economic well-being, increases biodiversity, cleans air and water, produces food, builds healthy soils, sequesters carbon, mitigates extreme weather events and creates resilience for surrounding communities and ecoregions. Creating that better coffee world requires an ongoing investment in coffee sustainability and on the part of trading companies in the capacity, capability, well-being, and economic resilience of the coffee growers they source from.

NOTES:

1. Suan Som Rom is a traditional fruit forest garden system of Southern Thailand that may hold common roots with very similar systems in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. The key local wet tropical fruit species of durian, longkong, and mangosteen are the foundation of an agro-ecosystem that also includes different native hardwoods, other fruit trees like burmese grapes and champadek, and cover crops like pepper leaf and native gingers.

2. This waterfall is named after the giant pandanus “Toey” that are found around this waterfall ecosystem. These pandanus were used traditionally for the fibers.

3. Nam Prik is a sort of chili sauce or salsa that is core to the daily cuisine throughout rural Thailand. It is served with a variety of fresh and quick boiled veggies. A dose of daily medicine and health. “Kapi” is a shrimp paste that is made from very small shrimp harvested in fresh, brackish, or salt waters.

Announcing “Wisdom of the Woods”: Inspired by the Regenerative Rubber Alliance

June 10, 2022 by admin

*Illustration by Jaroon Noipan from “Wisdom of the Woods”*

Announcing Wisdom of the Woods, a collection of illustrations and poetry borne out of the Regenerative Rubber Alliance. When Terra Genesis began partnering with Wanakaset farmers for the Regenerative Rubber Alliance, we understood that we were connecting with a community with a rich cultural and spiritual relationship with nature. Our work there was primarily driven by an objective to develop a regenerative rubber origin to be purchased by VF and integrated into Timberland products, but our philosophy of supply relationships impels us to form deeper and more complex commitments to the producer communities that we work with.

Specifically, when designing the Regenerative Outcome Verification^TM program, which we iterated in this initiative, we integrated the 8 Forms of Capital framework (developed by Terra Genesis founders Ethan Soloviev and Gregory Landua), a sequence of categories that indicate the health of a community: Financial, Social, Cultural, Material, Experiential, Living, Intellectual and Spiritual. Put simply: we hope to support and measure the enhancement of a community on all of these levels as a result of our collaboration.

This type of multidimensional thinking helps explain how an environmental consultancy and international apparel company came to support the creation of an anthology of poetry and illustrations by Thai farmers.

Terra Genesis designer Michael Commons was moved by Vinai Nuansanong’s poetry, and received his permission to translate the writing and share it with his colleagues, and their partners at VF who, in turn, were moved to elevate the work with a publishing budget.

Natural dye artist and Wanakaset member Jaroon Noipan contributed illustrations and an introduction, and a limited number of hard copies were published in March 2022 for distribution at the regenerative rubber summit held March, 22, 2022 in the community of Tamot, Phatthalung where the author and other key leaders in the vision and practice of regenerative rubber agroforestry live.

For the first time, this anthology is available for the public’s enjoyment here.