Seeding Resilience

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Seeding Resilience

Academic project
Harvard Graduate School of Design
What is a Lake? LA Option Studio / Fall 2022
Advised by: Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich

Project partner: Ruijie Liu

Maize was domesticated in Mexico about 9,000 years ago and remains central to Indigenous culture, sustenance, and crop genetic development. Milpa, the traditional Mesoamerican polyculture of maize, beans, and squash, embodies agricultural productivity, ecological diversity, and cultural vitality. Since the Green Revolution of the 1940s, however, industrial agriculture has threatened native maize landraces and milpa, a pressure compounded worldwide by worsening climate and soil conditions. In Texcoco, northeast of Mexico City, ejido lands farmed by local peasant farmers are strained by climate change, soil degradation, and monocultures. CIMMYT, the international maize and wheat research center based there, was founded to advance agriculture through science, including transgenic maize seed for monocultures, but has yet to deliver on its promises of sustainability and support for local farmers.

Building on milpa, this project conserves maize landraces and revitalizes soils by reintroducing diversity into living productive systems. After analyzing Texcoco's climate, topography, and soils, we identified two agroecological extremes: the salty lowland and the degraded upland.

In the lowland, AGRO-WAYS diversify soil productivity along the roads ejidatarios already travel. Salt-tolerant milpa palettes of maize, quelites (edible weeds), Tamarix, and halophytes respond to local soil and topographic conditions, and farmers can initiate them through coordinated land preparation. Social spaces at key nodes support communal activities, equipment sharing, and knowledge exchange. In the upland, where fertile soils are eroding from forest fragmentation, AGRO-FORESTS expand existing milpa with trees and crops through terraced agroforestry, multi-layered forests, highland agroforestry, and silvopasture on abandoned, overgrazed, or underused sites.

Across this transect, ejidatarios, CIMMYT researchers, and other scientists form long-term partnerships that prioritize soil health and Indigenous knowledge. In this envisioned future, traditional knowledge leads, and CIMMYT's technologies serve to monitor and support those practices. Together, AGRO-WAYS and AGRO-FORESTS weave through the ejido commons to sustain soil rehabilitation and milpa culture for generations.