Alfredo Villanueva
Rogelio Medina
Cesar Ortiz
Mario Parra
Rafael Mijangos
EGADE Business School Tecnologico de Monterrey
Consuelo Garcia-de-la-torre
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Rancho La Luna in Guadalajara, Mexico is a family owned sustainable farm on the outskirt of the metropolitan area. This enterprise is dedicated to grow artisans food without agrochemicals, pesticides, or growth hormones. This ecofriendly farm harvests lettuce, green tomatos, passion fruit, pink peppers, litchi, different types of mushrooms, watermelon, papaya, cucumber, strawberry and zucchini. The harvested food will depend on the season. Another business unit of the ranch is the raising of animals. The animals that they raise are rabbits, cattle, goats, sheep, fish, falcons, pigs, chicken, rosters, squab,and horses.
Alejandro Elizondo, owner and manager of Rancho la Luna started to develop the taste for ecological environment back when he was in school, as graduate student from Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Guadalajara. Back in his years as a student he, along with some friends, founded the real and first ecological society for the University. He developed an interest for this topic and started a whole new research and took what started in school all the way to adopting a way of living. Back in 2005, he materialized the vision of creating a sustainable environment and that is when Rancho La Luna started. With an extension of 3 hectares, he envisioned an ecosystem that on the first phase will sustain his own family needs of food and money. On the second phase, the ranch will supply enough resources to fulfill the dietary needs of 200 people or 70 houses on the surroundings including a restaurant in the ranch that will work on the weekends offering what is been grew on the farm. On the third phase, he will develop an ecofriendly elementary school that will teach the importance of taking care of mother earth. On the last and final phase, a housing development will be built for two different objectives. The first goal is to host elderly citizens as a senior health care center and the second purpose is to host agricultural enthusiasts worldwide to teach and learn different ecofriendly techniques.
Alejandro's inspiration came from the fact that no one in the area did something similar and for his deep love of nature. His deep concern on how the world is evolving in a non-ecological manner drove his passion and poise for this interesting project. Another important fact is how he saw over the years his family owned land wild life being diminished; this came as a decisive point on how to take the type of animals back to their original state.
Rancho La Luna is a clear example of what it refers to in terms of social responsibility and corporate sustainability, as it adopts patterns of behavior that are characteristic of companies of this nature. Its operating strategy is appropriate to the model of circular economy, because it aims to use the least amount of resources of all kinds to generate food for society and pretends that these resources maintain their usefulness and value at all times.
It is also inspired by the models of regenerative agriculture, whose main exponent is Joel Salatin and defines them as "a resilient and regenerative agro - livestock system that integrates living soil, plants and animals in a productive, mutually beneficial and interrelated way". This is how Alejandro Elizondo is always aware of the fertility of his soils and the productivity of meat products of optimum nutritional quality that allow him to offer his customers the best products available for human consumption and committed to the well-being of nature.
Another of the principles or phenomena that inspired Alejandro Elizondo to start a business with these peculiar characteristics, was the one known as "Permaculture", which were the Australians Bill Modison and David Holmgren, who coined it for the first time and that in words of This first defines it as "the philosophy of working with, not against nature, of prolonged and reflective observation, instead of prolonged and inscrutable labors; To understand plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating areas as mono-productive systems. In this way it is how Alejandro was able to realize an ecological design and architecture that allow him to close cycles in a natural way and get the optimization of the natural resources involved throughout the process.
That is why Alexander has adopted as a philosophy of life the "celebrate life through food"; For which there must be the commitment for each member of a family of five, must be integrated in the production of food.
Rancho La Luna is highly profitable business with three mainstreams of revenue: 1) organic vegetables, 2) organic animals, 3) restaurant, 4) Ecology consulting and 5) elementary school. This business reduces waste by re-utilizing biodegradable matter.
Social benefit
He employs local people from the community, while he grows his groceries and farms his animals, he generates a general change over the whole community. The fact that he is a local farmer in a low income community, makes a positive impact on the area, incentivizing others to gain from this while he promotes the economy of the whole community.
Environmental benefit
The way the organization works, is implemented to generate zero waste, he don’t have to buy anything from the outside and every single aspect of his chain is reusable. As an example, the leftovers of the restaurant are used to feed other animals such as the rabbits. The waste produced by the rabbits are great source of materials used to feed the fish. The whole water in the pond mixed with the sediments created by the fish are used to harvest the plants and vegetables, and in this way the whole chain starts over.
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