Regenerating drylands in Colorado: soil and water restoration

The Soil-Water Stewardship Pilot spans 1,000 acres across 16 Boulder County properties and works to restore how working lands absorb, store, and release water, which is the foundation of reliable food production in our drought-prone region. By rebuilding soil health and water retention on working lands, DAR helps ensure that the farms and food systems that we all depend on remain viable through drought and climate variability.

Money raised in this campaign will go directly to supporting the regeneration of and research on dryland agroecosystems in Boulder County, Colorado.

ORGANIZATION BACKGROUND

Founded in 2017, Drylands Agroecology Research (DAR) is a Boulder County nonprofit that exists to regenerate landscapes to improve life on Earth. We believe a livable future begins from the ground up.

DAR was born from a conviction that how humans relate to land reflects how they relate to each other — and that healing degraded landscapes is inseparable from rebuilding the cultural practices, knowledge systems, and communities that once sustained them. That conviction shapes everything at DAR: how we tend the land, build community, and understand the relationship between ecological health and human wellbeing.

Since its founding, DAR has combined research, on-the-ground land stewardship, and community education to advance practical approaches to restoring working lands in Colorado's dry climate. As drought, rising temperatures, and increasingly variable precipitation put growing pressure on soil, water, and food systems, this work is becoming ever more urgent. Through demonstration sites and land management across multiple Boulder County properties, DAR builds real-world examples of how drylands can be regeneratively managed — and generates research results to translate those examples into practical guidance for land managers across the American West.

Over nearly a decade of work in Boulder County and beyond, DAR's impact encompasses:

• 97 design and earthworks projects completed impacting over 1,000 acres,
• more than 230,000 trees planted across degraded dryland sites in partnership with Restoration Agriculture Design, 
• over 125,000 linear feet of water-harvesting swales constructed,
• nearly 5,000 tons of carbon sequestered, and
• Gains in soil organic matter, water infiltration rates, and water holding capacity.

GOALS

DAR’s primary goals fall within three realms of responsibility: Land, People, Knowledge.

• Land. To improve the long-term ecological function of Boulder County land — building soil health, water retention, biodiversity, and food and medicine production systems through sustained, place-based stewardship.
• People. To cultivate the conditions in which people and landscapes can thrive together — investing in work structures, compensation, rhythms, and relationships that make long-term land stewardship possible and replicable. 
• Knowledge. To measure and communicate the effects of our land management practices with clarity, precision, and honesty — generating field-based insight that supports better decisions by land managers, partners, and funders across the region. 

SOIL-WATER STEWARDSHIP PILOT:

This three-year project spans 1,000 acres across 16 properties in Boulder County and explores how land management practices can help soil better absorb and retain water in semi-arid environments. Working alongside our partners at Colorado State University, DAR is combining practices such as adaptive grazing, contour terracing, and agroforestry with active monitoring to measure outcomes like soil moisture, water infiltration, plant growth, and runoff behavior. The goal is to produce clear, practical guidance for land managers and funders while building healthier soils, more reliable forage, and greater community resilience.

Between 2026 and 2029, DAR’s Soil-Water Stewardship pilot will:

• Improve soil-water function across 1,000 managed acres.
• Test whether adaptive grazing, terracing, and agroforestry mutually reinforce each other.
• Translate field observations into practical, place-based guidance for land managers.
• Give partners the evidence to evaluate hydrologic stewardship with confidence.

THE PROBLEM WE ADDRESS

Drylands cover more than 40% of Earth's land surface and support over 2.3 billion people, yet that very land is losing its ability to sustain life. As soils compact and vegetation thins under extractive land use and a warming climate, precipitation runs off rather than soaking in. Without water held in the soil, plant communities destabilize, forage becomes unreliable, and working lands decline. Aridity is now the leading driver of agricultural degradation globally, affecting 40% of all arable land. This is desertification – and it's endemic in semi-arid regions across the American West.

In Boulder County, local food and forage systems face growing instability as drought frequency rises and water availability (the primary constraint on ecological function in semi-arid landscapes) becomes less predictable. Land managers here are navigating this in real time: searching for practices that build soil health, hold water, and keep working lands productive under conditions that are only becoming more demanding.

Conservation tools exist, but are often applied in isolation, evaluated over short timeframes, and disconnected from how land actually responds across diverse conditions over time. Land managers lack practical, place-based guidance on what combinations of practices work in their specific context, and funders lack the field-based evidence needed to invest confidently in land health.

This is the gap DAR exists to fill.

From the ground up.