1. Business Description
Tz'ikin is the Nawal of abundance. The farm is named after the energetic archetype of the bird, guardian of the land and seed in the Mayan worldview. It symbolizes communication, freedom and abundance, which aligns perfectly with the project's objectives. The owners, with their knowledge in permaculture, wanted to demonstrate that what is technically recommended works in real life. It is a constant learning process that has generated experience and that based on this and the knowledge in design, they have managed to increasingly consolidate their model and that this has been shown in the field to the community and that it is gaining more and more interest from the locals, who mostly work the land with traditional or conventional management. This farm is located approximately 1,677 meters above sea level. The area of the Farm-Hotel-Restaurant is 0.2 ha with property title and they rent 0.14 ha more for raising goats for milk and laying hens.
2. Production and service systems
The owners define their farm as organic, based on permaculture techniques. This gra
nja has a business model that integrates service sales activities such as hospitality, food, and cultural space, which revolves around agricultural and livestock activities, such as the organic silvo-agricultural garden, the forest regeneration process with a futuristic approach to food forests, and is complemented by the livestock part, where they have another space 1 kilometer from the main site, the sheepfold for semi-stabled goats and a space for laying hens with semi-grazing and an annex of an organic silvo-agricultural garden that complements it. They are in the process of renting a new farm to produce vegetables and expand their niche to other restaurants in the department, since, due to its strategic location near Lake Atitlán, the environment becomes touristic, an opportunity to give sustainability to their initiative.
3. The regenerative approach
Regarding the regenerative approach, what we highlight is the affinity for environmental conservation, where there is active participation through the community, but it is very important in this process to have projects with non-reimbursable funds to give continuity to the actions of community integration in a place where the economy based on agricultural products is very difficult. The monoculture of basic grains as a means of subsistence, the lack of resources of people to invest in mitigation actions and strategies aligned to the NAR depend greatly on these resources. An important factor is tourism, which already brings with it the issue of low impact, commitment to the environment and the organic issue and regeneration of agroecosystems. The future vision of the Tz'ikin Farm is to lead the regenerative, through permaculture, food forests and in parallel, work on physical conservation works, promotion of cover management and avoiding the application of agrochemical products.
