When Ana María Castro decided to use up her savings to buy a desolate piece of land, her husband had his doubts. What could she possibly grow in that soilless gravel pit?

Her reply:

“Let me be. I want my plot of land.”

As a woman in rural El Plantel, Honduras, Ana María had been involved with coffee production on other people’s farms before but she’d never had a plot of her own. But she had been preparing for this kind of challenge for more than a decade, with support from SeedChange donors. She took training in agroforestry and how to use trees alongside other crops from our Honduran partner, Fundación para la Investigación Participativa con Agricultores de Honduras (FIPAH). She was (and still is) an active member of a group of local farmers who do on-farm crop research together. And she spent endless hours learning agroecological growing techniques.

So she went for it and got the land.