The Milpa Project supports sustainable family and community agriculture in the valley of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. Milpa is a crop-growing system used throughout the territory called Mesoamerica (the region of central-southeastern Mexico and northern Central America where the most important pre-Hispanic civilizations flourished). The word milpa is a term used in Mexico that means "field," and is derived from the Nahuatl (language of the Aztecs) phrase mil-pa "to the field". Based on the ancient agricultural methods of Maya, Zapotec and other Mesoamerican peoples, milpa agriculture produces maize (corn), beans, and squash, along with other crops suitable to the local conditions.

The Project will take two years to complete documenting all aspects of contemporary milpa agriculture with a focus on the community of San Felipe del Agua on the flank of the mountains north of Oaxaca City. The material collected will be compiled in a book, displayed in a gallery show and presented through this website.

It must have been growing — in the back of our minds and deep in our hearts — over nearly twenty years of traveling in southern Mexico—Oaxaca, Yucatan, Chiapas—and coming home to Vancouver Island with treasures to fill our house. Each year we brought back photographs, ceramics, textiles, love for the xoloitzcuintle, impressions and always ideas.

The Milpa Project was built one observation, one idea, one friend, one tortilla at a time. It came to life during a Christmas stay at San Felipe. It was there that we met our collaborators Mauro Cruz Pérez, Blanca Cué and Andy Keith and thought about the winter fallow milpa that lay in the valley below our rented house.

The Milpa Project is built around a portfolio of photographs that document all stages of the milpa and the way this ancient form of agriculture sustains and informs life in San Felipe, a community in the heart of the birthplace of corn. The purpose of the project is to broaden knowledge and garner support for one of the world's best examples of sustainable agriculture. With its technology, expanding globalization and the pressure of modernity, the 21st Century threatens the milpa and all it provides — tradition, community, food for the body and sustenance for the spirit. We hope the Milpa Project will bring attention to this situation.