When Cattle Bring the Desert Back: Alejandro Carrillo’s Regenerative Ranching Story
- sushmita62
- 14 minutes ago
- 2 min read
When Ray Archuleta talks about Alejandro Carrillo, his tone carries equal parts awe and conviction. He recalls standing in the heat of Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert — a place that gets ten inches of rain a year, on a good year — and watching grassland reappear where bare soil and thorn scrub once dominated.
“I saw cattle bring the desert back,” Ray says, “and transform it back into native rangeland. It changed the local climate. He’s getting more rain now.”
The transformation Ray describes wasn’t magic — it was management. Alejandro Carrillo’s Las Damas Ranch began its shift decades ago, rooted in a simple but radical belief: the land doesn’t need more inputs, it needs more life. Through adaptive, holistic grazing, he used his cattle to mimic the natural movement of wild herds — short, intense grazing followed by long rest periods. Over time, living roots stayed in the soil longer, organic matter increased, and water began to infiltrate rather than run off.
If it works in the desert…
Ray often tells this story because of what it means for the rest of us. “If it can be done there,” he says, “it can be done anywhere.”
That’s not wishful thinking — it’s a challenge to rethink what’s possible. In much wetter parts of the Great Plains, ranchers already see the same principles at work.
Take Bart Carmichael in northwestern South Dakota. Years ago, he grazed on land that couldn’t produce 800 pounds of forage per acre. Today, he leaves 1,000 pounds of residue on that same ground after grazing — proof that life and management, not rainfall alone, determine productivity.
The philosophy behind it
Both Carrillo and Carmichael embody what Ray calls the regenerative mindset — learning to “interpret the world through nature’s eyes”. Instead of forcing the land to meet our expectations, we learn from its feedback. Adaptive grazing, Ray reminds us, means watching the plants, the animals, and the climate—and adjusting constantly. That mindset turns “problems” into patterns: brittle environments become places where livestock can be tools of restoration rather than sources of degradation.
Why these matters
Carrillo’s desert ranch and Carmichael’s Dakota pastures tell the same story in two different climates: life begets life. When managed properly, cattle are not the enemy of grasslands — they’re the key to their renewal.
If a man can grow grass where rain barely falls, what’s possible for those of us with twice or three times that rainfall?
👉 Watch the short film with Ray Archuleta — filmed by Joe Dickie and inspired by Alejandro Carrillo’s desert transformation — to see this story come alive.
Learn more about Alejandro Carrillo’s work:
Visit these “Growing Resilience Through Our Soils” information pages:
1. Podcast page for drought planning fact sheets, Q&As, news, podcasts, and more.
2. Video page to watch videos of other ranchers’ journeys toward improved rangeland/pasture.
3. Follow Growing Resilience on social media:
4. Our homepage: www.growingresiliencesd.com