Women Of The Land

Women of the Land is a working regenerative dairy, land-based education center, and earth-focused artist residency in the high desert of New Mexico. We teach people to reconnect with local food and the natural world — through the making of traditional dairy products, hands-on farm workshops, and residencies that give women the chance to live and work on the land, telling its stories through writing, song, film, and art.

[Women of the Land is a registered 501(C)(3) nonprofit organization]

Our Three Pillars

Regenerative Dairy Farm

Women of the Land runs a small herd of dairy cows and is one of the only regenerative dairies in New Mexico. Community members join as herd-share members, connecting them directly to the animals and land producing their milk. This program is the proof of concept behind everything else we teach: a real, working alternative to industrial dairy and large-scale agriculture, as well as the cultivation of a living, daily ritual with animals and the land.

Land-Based Education

Hands-on workshops open the daily practice of the farm to the public: milking, pasture management, and dairy/cheese-making. These sessions give people the practical skills to move toward local, small-scale food production in their own lives — turning "support local farmers" from a value into a set of skills.

Earth-Focused Artist Residencies

Two-week residencies host women artists on the farm to make work in direct response to the natural world. Women of the Land supports getting resident work out into the world — through publication, exhibition, or public showcase — so the residency's insights reach beyond the farm itself.

“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
—Wendell Berry

About Jen + Heathar

Two women taking a selfie in front of a rustic wooden door, smiling and posing playfully.

For the past four years, we have tended a small five-acre parcel of land in northern New Mexico. We taught ourselves how to run a small-scale dairy, and in that same time, brought organic dairy products to our local community. In our first year of farming, we won the Local Hero Award for our service as dairy farmers in New Mexico — and realized we might be onto something.

In the years since, we've come to understand the tremendous importance of supporting small, local food systems — and of creating inspiration and pathways for others to do the same. We both came from academic and artistic backgrounds, and both of us were longing to return to the natural world: to live in a rural place, to understand a way of life outside the city. As often happens with hard, unfamiliar work, we began to write about and document the farm as it unfolded. We watched our proximity to the natural world heal us — and the people around us — filling the gaps of our loneliness and quietly weaving a web of community. What we had built, we realized, was more than a farm. We wanted to create a legacy and a lineage that could draw people back to the earth.

Women of the Land is a living prayer — to the earth, and to all of humanity — that it is not the earth that needs us, but we who need the earth. By reconnecting with the land, with the animals who feed us, and with the stories the wild has to tell, we can restore ancient ways of living and knowing that keep us sustained, connected, and ensouled.