What do we do?

Our projects range from disaster relief and community shelter building to regenerative agroforestry and watershed restoration and management. Construction and agriculture are major contributors to both global worming and global biodiversity. RFI projects in construction, agroforestry and restoration aim to provide jobs to our community, educational experiences both locally and internationally, and research programs for bioregional movement-building.

Our goal is to not just talk, but demonstrate compelling answers to the most pressing issues of our time. To this end, we build community centers, bus stops and shade structures out of native guadua bamboo, cultivate cacao, coconut, avocado and more in our syntropic agroforestry project and both reforest and stabilize degrading rivers and hillsides.

Where do we work?

Our projects are centered in the coastal province of Manabí, Ecuador around the port city of Bahía de Carácquez and agricultural county of Chone, 1 hour away. This region was devastated by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 2016, creating the need for immediate, cheap, strong housing alternatives and restoration work along the crumbling hillsides common in this region. to address this work, we work with student programs, local governments and NGOs to build, regenerate and educate. Our center is in our ranch, Los Arboleros Farm in Chone where we host the majority of our student programs and workshops.

See below for past and ongoing projects!

Background

After the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in coastal Ecuador on April 16, 2016 we started our journey as bamboo builders. To date we have sourced, trained, and employed dozens of local builders and hundreds of students students. We build 8-10 bus stops, stores, homes and other structures a year in collaboration with local carpenters, architects and our international student programs. In total, we’ve build 22 seismically safe homes, and 60 other businesses/shelters. Since 2017, we have been planting bamboo to restore degraded riverbeds in our ranch, Los Arboleros Farm (LAF) in Chone. We are in the process of nurturing our growing bamboo groves and creating curing facilities at LAF to increase the supply of regenerative cured bamboo on the coast, as well as continuing to offer bamboo building courses for local and international guests. Learn more here.

Why Bamboo

Bamboo is a rapid growing, strong and flexible building material that is locally available and abundant throughout most of Ecuador. The species RFI uses is called Guadua angustifolia or Caña Guadua in Costeño (coastal) Spanish. It is known for being ‘acero vegetal’ or ‘vegetable steel’. Guadua bamboo is in fact stronger than steel, with a much more environmentally friendly supply chain. Bamboo enriches the landscape by preventing erosion, storing carbon, and creating habitat for birds, insects and endangered Mantled Howler Monkeys among other animals.

2024 season projects

2023 projects

Past projects

Why Syntropic farming?

Syntropic farming began in Brazil drawing from various indigenous practices of regenerative agroforestry alongside the contemporary need to cultivate the same land year in year out. Traditional systems were able to let land lie fallow (uncultivated) due to the natural abundance of forest. We live in a starkly different world now. With only 2% of our local tropical dry forest intact, this system allows us to regenerate our soil and our ecosystem while growing food crops and timber every year on the same land.

You can think of syntropy as the inverse of “entropy.” While entropy is the tendency towards chaos or simplification (think acres and acres of only corn in Iowa), syntropy is the tendency towards increased complexity we see in forests as they mature. Our farm will take 10-12 years to reach the beginning of that “peak” maturity phase, but as time passes, more plants grow and the howlers and other creatures return, there is no way of predicting the upper limits of the ecological complexity that will follow.

Background

After 6 years of earthquake relief, we began to look upstream at the causes of the landslides and economic instability which made the 2016 earthquakes as disastrous as they were. Seeing the overgrazed hills of cow pasture and extensive monocrops of shrimp, bananas and cacao driven by frequently shifting international markets, we saw depleted soils, destroyed habitats and an undiversified economic system setting up its owners for periodic cataclysm. We began our successional agroforestry system in 2022 to create a model for what diversified economic revenue streams, reforestation and soil regeneration can look like bound together in one agroecosystem. Since then we have held workshops, welcomed local farmers, and expanded our agroforestry plots to over 3 hectares from an original 1 with hopes to expand even further!

Updates

GALLERY

What is restoration?

Restoration is the healing of our landscape and our relationship to it. Our province of Manabí is one of the most degraded landscapes in the world. Only 2% of native primary forests remain, and over 95% of the landscape is deforested or deeply degraded. The majority of the landscape is grassland, planted with non-native African grasses for cattle, followed by corn (cattlefeed), bananas, and cacao in the hills and shrimperies along brackish waterways which used to boast abundant mangroves. Despite this degradation, local organizations and communities are coming together to create new economic opportunities aligned with regeneration.

RFI and Restoration

Only 5% of Manabí is protected. Relative to the 20% of Ecuador’s land nationwide, this is a pittance.. This blind spot in historical environmental movements is where we collaborate with local initiatives to fortify riverbeds, prevent erosion and reforest our landscape. We plant bamboo along riverbeds to fortify eroding riverbanks and invest in building material for the future. Bamboo goes into erosion dykes to fortify streams while bamboo, vetiver grass and other plants can stabilize the hillsides. We reforest and plant on our own 30 ha, and in collaboration with local and international organizations like Punta Gorda Nature Reserve south of Bahía de Carácquez and Jama Coaque Reserve 2 hours to the north. Most recently, we won the Premio Verde, a $100,000 grant from Ecuador’s Banco de Desarollo to assist in municipal-level restoration campaigns.

updates