Epic Transformation Turning Desert Erosion Into Thriving Farm & Ecosystem!

An incredible transformation is happening in one of the hottest deserts in the world. Because during the driest time of year, when it hasn't rained for six months and the land is completely dried out, the landscape on the project we're visiting today is incredibly lush and green, unlike everywhere else. And not only that, water is flowing through its rivers when normally it wouldn't be at this time of year. But what's even more amazing is that whilst we were filming, it actually rained, which is completely unheard of during this month of the year. In today's episode, we are going to see Rancho Cacahelas, an absolutely huge regenerative farm and conservation project, demonstrating how to integrate livestock, watershed management, and organic farming. And it's doing it at scale, across 16,500 hectares of land. The ranch has two types of livestock, cattle and goats. The cattle are for erosion control and landscape restoration over large areas, and the goats are bred for milking to make organic artisanal cheese. The project also has two farms using regenerative agriculture and agroforestry, growing crops from their own desert-adapted seeds and creating rich, fertile soil by using a special formula to inoculate the desert earth with microorganisms. They have also implemented one of the world's most significant watershed and erosion control programs that's not only recharged wells and groundwater, it's also brought back year-round flowing water to rivers that had been dried up for decades. In fact, it's so successful that scientists are currently in the middle of a five-year research project to provide metrics and quantitative evidence for these incredible achievements. I'm really excited to see this project because of this incredible Instagram post which shows the fence line of the property. On their land that's been regenerated by cattle, it has way more vegetation compared to the neighbor's land outside the property. And we're going to go to that exact same spot at the driest time of year to see it for ourselves. Since cows are not native to North America, there's a lot of debate if cattle can be used to regenerate deserts at all, and also if deserts should be left alone entirely. But deserts aren't always just desolate places. About one million people call Southern Baja California home, where today's project is located. And it's the driest state in Mexico, yet its desert is known to be one of the most biodiverse deserts in the world, filled with medicinal plants, giant cactus, and unusual elephant-shaped trees. In this particular region, ecological decline is sadly underway due to logging and unmanaged grazing. So it's important that something is done to turn it around. But I've also been very skeptical about using cattle for regenerative land management. Because cattle are not like native herd animals such as bison, studies have shown cattle spend more time grazing, are slower moving, and have smaller ranges compared to bison. So I'm intrigued to find out what this ranch is doing differently to be able to turn an eroding landscape back into a thriving desert ecosystem. You can have cattle even in an arid environment. You just have to manage them according to your ecosystem. I was picked up bright and early to visit the ranch. And after driving for about an hour, we arrived at the property. As we made our way to find the cattle herd, I was impressed with the amount of dense vegetation on the property, which I was told is all thanks to their cows. And it was the cows who we were making our way across the property to see first. I was going to be shown the regenerative cattle project by Saeed, the wilderness medicine instructor on the ranch. And once we found some of the herd grazing close to the fence, Saeed led us into the paddock to take a look and see if we could find more cows. But unlike your usual farmyard cows, this herd is not used to humans. In fact, they are very shy. So it was a challenge to keep up with them as they made their way through the thick vegetation of trees and bushes. This is our cattle herd. We use it to control erosion in the area. We started the project in 2008, so it's been 15, almost 16 years now. This herd is a breed of Criollo cattle, which are known as the desert-friendly cow because of its ability to thrive in desert conditions. It's the oldest known cattle breed in the Americas, introduced by the Spanish. Now the ranch has started crossbreeding them with Angus and Red Wagyu. To see what the ranch looked like before, Sebastian, the head guide, drove us to a spot just 10 minutes away outside the property where cattle and goats are roaming freely. And the difference compared to the ranch was shocking because stretching out as far as the eye could see were severely eroded valleys covered in gullies with very minimal vegetation. It's because of the lack of plants. It's because of the over-grazing of the animals. But it's also because of the large amount of rain that we've been having. Everywhere we looked, we could see exposed roots of trees and plants, showing how much of the topsoil has been washed away in rain events, causing the ground level to drop. Down here, the level was probably like here, at least here. And now it dropped all this part. So these roots are able to handle some of it, but they need the other plants, the smaller plants. Because cattle and goats are freely grazing here, they're eating up all the vegetation and compacting the surface of the soil, so it can't absorb water, which means when it rains, water runs off the land, causing erosion. So here we're looking at naked ground. Every time a little drop falls in here, it starts the erosion just by falling. Once it reaches the gully, these pebbles start working as a sandpaper, taking away these little plants and digging down. As new plants are not growing here and rainwater is causing erosion instead of being absorbed into the soil, this landscape is trapped in a downward spiral of degradation. So what are they doing so differently back at the ranch with their livestock? That's not only preventing erosion, but also restoring an ecosystem back to life. We are seeing really good results with using the herd and their ocean control. The main goal is to not have cows stay in one place for too long. To avoid livestock overgrazing and compacting the ground where they're walking, the ranch has installed fencing to divide the land into paddocks and they control where and how often the cows are grazing by rotating the herd's location. We have 20 paddocks. Each paddock is 80 to 100 hectares. The cows stay in a paddock for about a month at a time. That gives us about a year and a half of resting time for each paddock between each visit of the herds. A crucial part of the regeneration is to give the land a chance to recover, so the ranch chooses grazed areas to close off for a resting period of 1.5 years. The herd, when it comes back, it finds an area that is greener and more full of plants. This is because in the short term cattle do several things which benefit landscapes. Cows walk around eating and putting poop everywhere, so all that poop not only fertilizes the land, puts a lot of nutrients into the land, but also spreads seeds. They also trim plants, which promotes their growth. The ranch deliberately has a low density herd, which means the number of cows compared to the total land area is a lot less than conventional cow farming. This means cows have much more space to graze and they graze for less time in each area, which actually benefits the state of the soil. The difference in the soil, the soil here is free and it's broken up. You can see it here in the area under the cactus where the cows are not stepping on. The soil here is way harder. It's formed sort of a cross layer that is hydrophobic. That means that water cannot penetrate it. The water cannot go in the land to get absorbed by plants. This is way harder than what we have over here. This is softer because the cows have been walking around. They've broken down the soil, so water can seep in through here, through the soil and get absorbed both for plants and for the aquifer, so we can also take use of that water. This is why livestock density is really important to be able to effectively regenerate the land and prevent overgrazing. So here, 116 cows are being regularly moved over a large area, a whopping 1,750 hectares, which is almost eight times more than normal. The average is one cow per half a hectare. So by having a controlled herd, you're promoting the growth of the ecosystem and the regeneration of the ecosystem. To illustrate just how effective their system is at regenerating vegetation, it was time to go to the location of the Instagram post at the fence line of the property. So we can see the difference between the vegetation on the ranch and the land outside the ranch. On the way, we saw two deer and a jackrabbit on the road. I was taken aback by the sheer volume of the dense green vegetation, especially considering it's the driest time of the year and it was six months since the last big rain event. We've come to the very edge of the property to see the difference between inside the ranch and outside the ranch. The driest time of year, the far greener land inside the ranch, which has been allowed to rest and recover from grazing for over a year. It's thick with lush green vegetation. On the other side, where there have been free grazing cattle, there's noticeably far less plants and a lot more exposed ground. I went to take a closer look at the land outside the ranch. On this side, you can see how dry it is. The ground was really hard. Rainwater isn't going to be able to go into the ground here. It's just going to run off. This is a perfect example of why rotational grazing and fencing is so vital so the land and the plants can recover. The inspiration for this is based on recreating what landscapes were like before human intervention and protecting them from things that disrupt their natural balance. In nature, this would normally be done by predators. So when you look at the African savanna and you have all the wildebeest, lions move the herd so they are not stagnant in a place. But here we don't have big predators for them because cows are not natural from here. So we have to sort of mimic nature and move the herd ourselves. A lot of what we do in this holistic management is mimicking nature's processes to sort of go back to this natural cycle. Let me know in the comments what you think of this project as an alternative to conventional cattle management. At lunch, while I enjoyed a delicious meal with vegetables from the organic farm made by the incredible chefs Daniel and Isaac, I look forward to the rest of my tour of the ranch when I'll be seeing their herd of regenerative goats, checking out the two organic desert farms to see how they're growing mycelium to improve the soil, and of course, their incredible watershed restoration project to learn how they've made ephemeral desert streams flow with water all year long. So I hope you'll be joining me for that. And if you enjoyed this video, please give it a like and consider subscribing. Thanks for watching.