REGINALDO HASLETTMARROQUIN REGENERATIVE FARMER
Every so often, someone says something that you know is going to stay with you for life. My first conversation with Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin was like that. He said, just as an aside to some bigger point, “Well, we’re all indigenous to the earth”. While the majority of the world might have lost sight of our indigenous nature, Reginaldo is using regenerative poultry farming as a way to bring it back into focus. He is the founder and CEO of the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance and works with people around the world to centre indigenous knowledge in food production.
Currently, the food system contributes roughly a third of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and is the biggest cause of biodiversity loss. The increasing industrialisation of farming is consolidating land into the hands of ever fewer big farmers, making it harder for small farmers to compete, and causing a vicious cycle of inequality. Reginaldo’s work is a case study in how indigenous ways of thinking can dismantle the profit-driven, extractive food system. His regenerative poultry model increases the amount of food produced as well as its nutritional quality. It improves the soil and water quality of the farm. And it improves the social and economic outcomes of the small farmers who work the land and keeps the benefits in the local community. Importantly, it is easy to adopt, and scales even at small farm sizes. At its roots, regenerative agriculture is about taking care of the land with passion and dedication. After all, as Regi said to me when I first met him, we belong to the earth, the earth doesn’t belong to us.
Subject: Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin
Occupation: Farmer
Interviewer: Pip Wheaton
Photographer: Juan Brenner
Location: Guatemala City
Date: February 2022
PIP WHEATON: You’ve been working in regenerative agriculture, specifically poultry, for over a decade now. Arguably your whole life, right? The question I have to start with is, what’s so special about chickens?
REGINALDO HASLETT-MARROQUIN: [Laughs]. Yes, exactly! What is so special about chickens? And I’m telling you it’s probably the most amazing livestock the world has ever seen. It’s no coincidence everybody wants chickens. Everywhere I go, the first thing people show me is their chickens.
I want chickens.
Exactly. Even in the urban centres. It has become a global phenomenon in the last 10 years. But what is special about chickens? Well, you’ve got to understand there is something special about all livestock, all organisms that have chewing mechanisms, and digestive systems. And the reason is because collectively, the digestive systems of every organism on earth, all the way from the microbes to the worms, the invertebrates to the vertebrates, all the way to the mammals and the larger mammals. We all represent – and this includes humans, because we are part of nature – the digestive system of the earth itself. There are three places where energy is transformed at a mass scale globally. First is the photosynthetic process of Earth, which requires of course plants, so that they can capture as much of that energy from the sun as possible and as much of the gasses floating in the atmosphere, which they turn into a different expression of energy such as leaves and vegetables. Next to that is the animal kingdom, where organisms are now taking in a lot of those very complex structures, like cellulose, and these longer
