Where this goes from here.
Where I Started
In 2020, during COVID, my father and I started driving to our family ranch in Unión de Tula, Jalisco. Those trips changed everything. I saw the land — volcanic soil, tropical dry forest, agave growing among native trees — and I saw what industrial monoculture was doing to the landscape around it. Ejidatarios leasing their fields to tequila companies and getting degraded earth in return. Biodiversity stripped. Soil depleted. Fire risk climbing.
I started planting agave. Not in rows on cleared land, but within the existing ecosystem — among tepames, tepehuajes, huizaches, copales, ozotes. I didn't know what I was building yet. I just knew I didn't want to do it the way everyone else was doing it.
Five years later, I have a name for it: Sereno de Cerro. A regenerative agave agroforestry project on 5 hectares of family land. 3,000+ agaves. A genetic seed reserve. A native nursery in development. A wildfire that proved the system works. And a website that tells the story: serenodecerro.com.
What Changed
The Terra.do LFA journey sharpened three things for me.
First, I learned to frame what I'm doing in the language of climate — carbon sequestration, ecosystem services, fire resilience, biodiversity restoration. I was already doing the work. Now I can communicate it to audiences beyond the ranch.
Second, the fire. In March 2025, a wildfire swept through the ranch. The plot with dried corn mulch burned. The plot with native