In October 2023, we visited two Cotopaxi Foundation impact partners in Ecuador, including ALIADOS. We spent a week seeing how ALIADOS supports regenerative agriculture and sustainable livelihoods through community cooperatives like Ally Guayusa. 

What do you picture when you think of a farm? Neat rows of crops stretching into the horizon? Plants growing in structured greenhouses or raised beds? Usually, modern agriculture brings to mind order.

That is anything but the vibe, however, in the “edible forests” found in Ecuador’s corner of the Amazon rainforest, which is widely considered the most biodiverse place on the planet. Here, agriculture is diverse, teeming, almost chaotic. This is “chakra” farming. 

What is chakra farming?

Chakra farming (which, as far as we can tell, holds no etymological ties to the Sanskrit term “chakra”) is an ancient method of growing food, while preserving the rainforest that is practiced by the Kichwa and other Indigenous people in the Amazon Basin. 

The Kichwa people of the Ecuadorian Amazon have been leaders in protecting the land here. They’ve fought logging, the fossil fuel industry, and monoculture, which is the polar opposite of chakra farming, with its harmful impacts like deforestation and toxic pesticides.

In stark contrast to industrial farming, chakra leans into the lush and tangled nature of a jungle. For example, instead of planting 100 pineapple trees, you might plant 20 pineapple trees, 20 coffee shrubs, 20 medicinal tea trees, 20 plantain trees, and 20 yucca trees. And not in tidy rows, but interwoven across a stretch of jungle. 

This Indigenous method of farming helps preserve the Amazon ecosystem and mitigate climate change, according to a 2017 study. Chakra isn’t just the more sustainable option—it also makes economic sense. ALIADOS—a nonprofit based in Quito, Ecuador and Cotopaxi Foundation partner—is dedicated to empowering farmers in the Amazon. This organization helps farmers enrich Chakra farming with regenerative agricultural techniques designed to increase yields and connect with markets. 

“Local people are best equipped to solve local problems,” explains ALIADOS Executive Director Wain Collen, and our role at ALIADOS is to provide local people with better access to the tools and resources they need to pursue their own aspirations.”

Now, with support from organizations like ALIADOS, some Amazonian communities are rejecting the monoculture ways that have harmed farmers and the rainforest in recent decades. Instead, they’re carving a path back into the past. 
 

Return to roots in the Amazon

“We’re going back to ancestral ways, while making a business.”

That’s how Maria Licuy describes what her Kichwa community, known as Wamani, has been up to in the past few years. Maria is a community leader and helps manage the approximately 5,000 hectares (12,355 acres) of forest where her community lives and farms.

On a Cotopaxi Foundation impact trip to Ecuador last fall, Maria told us how young farmers in Wamani were getting sick both physically and mentally from the heavy pesticides required to grow naranjilla—a fruit known as the “Quito orange,” like a cross between citrus and a tomato.

So to protect the health of her community, Maria has been leading the Wamani community in moving away from monoculture to return to the way her grandparents farmed the land, Chakra-style. This return to Chakra isn’t only about sustainability or economics. It’s about food security: supporting communities in growing what they need not only to make a living, but to survive.

Wearing tall rubber boots, Maria treks into the rainforest twice a day, everyday to tend to her chakra farm. There, she grows vanilla, pineapple, coffee, a vegetable related to heart of palm, and a dozen or more fruits we’d never heard of before. She tends to Copal trees, from which she taps a prized sap used for medicine, candles, and as a sweetener. She also raises tilapia in a couple of ponds at the base of her edible forest.

The beauty of the chakra method of farming, she explains, is that it’s inherently organic. No more pesticides required, which helps protect the health of the 800-some people in her community. 

The edible forest of 24 de Mayo

Glenda Andy and her mother Luduvina Licuy are showing us around their edible forest.
 

Here is a macambo (patasmuyo), a cousin of cacao with seeds that are roasted and eaten. Cinchona tree bark (from which quinine is derived) to treat malaria. Another kind of bark called ishpingo that smells exactly like cinnamon and is used as a spice.

An all-natural hairbrush pulled from a plant. Bark used as a culinary grater. Guava and yucca to eat. 

They point out leaves to make tea for the flu. Over there, tea leaves for snake bites. And tea leaves to slow bleeding during childbirth—Luduvina can attest to that, since she helped deliver all eight of Glenda’s healthy babies, plus many more children in their community of 24 de Mayo.

“The forest has a lot of food,” says Glenda, as she corrals caterpillars into a giant leaf and tucks them into her basket. Like Maria in the nearby Wamani area, Glenda, Luduvina, and the 24 de Mayo community—named for the day the community was established—are leaning back into chakra farming. 

Beyond food, Glenda’s family’s edible forest also has “a first aid kit,” tools, and recreational substances like the leaves used to make ayahuasca. In fact, the forest has much of what they need to survive.

But Glenda is using the chakra method to do more than just survive. She is the director of Ally Guayusa, a cooperative that processes and sells products grown in Glenda’s home of 24 de Mayo.

Ally Guayusa was originally founded to process guayusa tea leaves for the former energy drink brand Runa, but has since taken on a life of its own. Today, Ally still sells guayusa tea, while integrating more crops like heirloom jungle peanuts (muru inchi) and high-protein macambo seeds. For example, Ally Guayusa works with Ecuador-based company Canopy Bridge to strengthen the market potential of macambo as a nut and chocolate alternative. 

Supported by Cotopaxi Foundation partner ALIADOS, Ally Guayusa works with 68 local producers and offers internships to students who previously had to travel long distances to find pre-professional opportunities. Before Glenda became director, her sister Leo, who is now a process technician at Ally, served as director

The fact that these two women are leading 24 de Mayo’s biggest economic enterprise is unique. ALIADOS director Wain Collen says that “women literally are on the frontlines of land-use change in the Amazon.” But that doesn’t mean that women are the ones in formal leadership positions. So when both Leo and Glenda rose to the top of training programs and were selected to lead by Ally Guayusa’s general assembly, the path forward wasn’t exactly easy.

“This was a big challenge for me,” Leo says, who led Ally Guayusa from 2018 until 2022, when her sister Glenda became director. “But I had support from my work team. I always remember Glenda saying, ‘Come on, you can do it! Let's show that we can do it. Let's leave a mark.’ We have been through thick and thin.” 

While leading has been a challenge for these sisters, they are committed to creating a more sustainable future for Kichwa generations to come. Passing on the importance and techniques of chakra farming now lies at the heart of that future.

“We continue working, strengthening,” says Glenda, “so that our children will be left with our knowledge.” 

While Ally Guayusa's products are not currently available to purchase in the U.S., you can find organic guayusa from the Amazon via Waykana, Ecuador-grown jungle peanuts from hOMe Grown Living Foods, and macambo seeds from Ecuador in bulk.

We worked with a local videographer based in Ecuador, Esteban Barrera, to produce the video for this story. Photography is by James Roh.