Planning Climate-Resilient Farms with Hand-Drawn Maps and Satellite Images
In the Andes of Ecuador, sketching plots with satellite images are helping farming families imagine and work toward climate-resilient farms.
High in the Ecuadorian Andes, two farming communities, Cuellaloma in Chimborazo and Atocha in Cotopaxi, are redrawing the future of their land, quite literally. Farmers gather to sketch their chakras—traditional biodiverse Andean plots—as they want them to be. These hand-drawn maps help farmers plan strategically for food security, income, and resilience in the face of a changing climate.
The chakra is the heart of daily life for Kichwa families in the Andes. These ancestral systems enable communities to ensure food security, generate an income, pass down traditional knowledge, and preserve farming methods uniquely adapted to the region’s challenging environment.
But things are changing. The rains don’t come as they used to. Hail has become the norm, destroying crops in its passage. With the heat came new insects that thrive in warmer weather, bringing devastating pests. The chakra is inherently adaptable, but these climate shocks demand new strategies.
The “Mapa de Sueños”
“This is our Mapa de Sueños” – Our Map of Dreams says the group leader of a community we visited in Atocha, pointing to sketches of women’s chakras.
This initiative was introduced by our local partner EkoRural, as part of their community innovation funds. These funds function like community-led credit and savings groups, charging just 2% monthly interest and making small loans for livestock, seeds, and organic fertilizers. Alongside the financial support, EkoRural introduced the Mapa de Sueños as a practical tool to help families use their resources more strategically.
The process begins with satellite images of each farmer’s chakra, which provide a clear overview of a plot’s layout. Farmers then sketch their chakra on paper, overlaying their own vision of changes they want to make. The redesign is not presented merely as an exercise in imagination, but as a methodology for families to identify resources, gaps, and possible changes in their chakras. The emphasis is on creating the conditions and capacities for transformations to take place on the farm, beyond just on paper. Over the past three years, nearly 100 families across eight communities in Chimborazo and Cotopaxi have participated, learning to prioritize which changes are feasible and to define strategies for carrying them out.
Drawing their chakras encourages farmers to think strategically about what they plant, where and when they plant it, and how each element on the farm supports the rest. Farmers know they cannot always realize every idea they put on paper. But the Mapa de Sueños helps them organize their thoughts, clarify priorities, and take the next step, whether that’s improving soil fertility, introducing a new crop, or rethinking irrigation. EkoRural’s ongoing trainings, ranging from soil health analysis to diversification and water management, strengthen families’ ability to turn parts of their vision into reality.
From vision to practice: agroecology for climate-resilient farms
The drawings by themselves don’t transform farms, but they set a direction. Once farmers have a clearer vision of their chakras, EkoRural supports them with agroecology trainings and collective action to make parts of those visions real. In this way, the Mapa de Sueños becomes a bridge between imagination and concrete steps toward resilience.
Through this process, communities have renewed their commitment to agroecology, moving away from chemical inputs that, as they say, “brought us sickness” and “tired the land.” With manure from cows, sheep, guinea pigs, and chickens, farmers have turned hard, compact cangahua (volcanic) soil into 8–10 cm of fertile earth. Water collection wells now keep crops alive during dry spells. Targeted crop diversification, such as mixing beans, alfafa and vegetables alongside potatoes, has helped face pests and diseases, while regular crop rotations keep the chakras productive.
Individual farmers have seen tangible changes. Don Alfonso restored nine barren lots to fertile soil. Don Ventura went from one cow to seven in just two years, reinvesting his profits. Nancy, another member, used her first loan to buy chicken manure, increasing her potato harvest. She then used the money to buy a calf, and now she sells the manure to other farmers. She consults her children, who use their phone to study the weather, on the best planting times. Nancy used two small loans to boost her potato harvest, diversify her crops following her drawing’s new layout, and buy a calf, whose manure she now sells in the market.
The Mapa de Sueños also helped create space for collective and cultural change. In Atocha, women manage the community fund and lead agricultural experiments together. Leadership rotates, three treasurers manage finances instead of a single leader, and men now share responsibility for cooking during meetings. Mercedes, a young student, documents the community’s journey through video, sharing agroecological practices and Kichwa heritage with wider audiences.
The road ahead to building climate-resilient farms
This initiative shows that by combining creative planning with practical training, financing, and collective action, farmers can take concrete steps to adapt and build truly climate-resilient farms.
These initiatives bring hope, but challenges persist. Smallholders in Ecuador’s Andes, who manage 20–30% of agricultural land and produce up to 70% of the country’s food, face rising temperatures, erratic rains, and new pests, while chemical-intensive farming, particularly floriculture, continues to expand. Market access is limited and competitive, and unpredictable weather can wipe out entire crops. One farmer summed it up: “Sometimes we have to eat, sometimes we don’t.”
Initiatives like the Mapa de Sueños give farmers a way to plan for resilience. But sustained support through infrastructure, market access, training and financing is essential to help Andean communities turn their maps of dreams into a real, climate-resilient future. This is where you come in. No matter the amount, your contribution can help fund these initiatives and build climate-resilience from the ground up, learning from the communities on the frontlines of climate change.
Help communities build resilience to climate change
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