Women Of The Land
Women of the Land is a working regenerative dairy, artist residency, and traditional foodways education center in the high desert of New Mexico. We document the land, rural life, farming, and the traditions of food and agriculture, while inviting women artists to live and work here as they create work rooted in the earth. Through cooking classes and hands-on food education, we teach and inspire people to grow, prepare, and cook nourishing food for themselves and their families—and to cultivate more sustainable, connected ways of living from the land.
[Women of the Land is a registered 501(C)(3) nonprofit organization]
Our Three Pillars
Regenerative Dairy Farm + Products
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.
Traditional Foodways
We believe traditional foodways offer a meaningful way to reconnect with the land, our families, and the food that sustains us. Through cooking classes and hands-on education, we teach people how to grow, harvest, prepare, preserve, and cook nourishing food from simple, local ingredients. Our goal is to inspire greater self-sufficiency and a deeper relationship with food—giving people the skills and confidence to feed themselves and their families while learning to live more closely with the land.
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
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.
Explore Our Writing
Read Jen’s essays about farming, rural life in New Mexico, and the natural world.
Read Heathar’s articles on ancestral food practices and women’s wellness.
explore our farm store
