Regenerator Farmer Program at Cascade Ranch

The Cascade Regenerator Program helps new farmers, ranchers and land stewards take the next step in their careers, with an emphasis on providing equitable economic and wealth-building opportunities to under-resourced, early-stage farmers and ranchers. We focus on moving resources toward women, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and center our efforts on the regional farm community, Amah Mutsun Tribal members (the Amah Mutsun partners with Pie Ranch to steward the land at Cascade and “Home Pie” in honor of the Quiroste people), LGBTQIA people, and others who've been historically denied access to land. Under the leadership of the Director of Farmer and Rancher Opportunities, The Cascade Regenerator Program provides farmers and ranchers with land to start their own small farm businesses, along with mentorship, access to equipment, sales and marketing support, and financial and business planning training from our program partners.

In 2018 the Amah Mutsun Tribal Council gave us their blessing to pursue this project and shared their goals in partnering on a vision of weaving together traditional ecological knowledge and practices with regenerative agriculture principals. In 2019 we went through a community-based visioning process and collected feedback from surrounding farmers, partners, and potential Regenerator Program participants to inform the project, and began hosting the first Regenerator farm, Brisa Ranch.

The CRP currently houses five organic regenerative agriculture farms and projects employing over 16 people: CRP graduate, Brisa Ranch, which grows diversified fruits, vegetables, and flowers, and is run by three co-owners who have stayed on to lease farmland at Cascade, José Almendárez’s farm, growing dry-farmed beans and melons and Maria Zavala, a flower farmer who joined the CRP in 2024. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band operates a Native Plant Program on the site that has been instrumental in restoring the fire-damaged Coastside with native, more fire-resilient flora. The last project is an aquaculture project that also commenced in 2024 and is operated in partnership with UCSC. 

In addition to growing new businesses, CRP is a research and innovation lab to test and demonstrate the impacts of climate-smart farming and ranching practices, such as the use of nutrient rich water from onsite aquaculture tanks to simulate the growth of native plants, and other new agricultural technologies. 

If you are interested in learning more about the program, please fill out this brief interest form and we will be in touch!