We plant Trees on Contour

2.2 Million Trees Planted, so far…

While Contour Lines is a 501(c)(3), we don’t do “charity for the poor,” we do working grants to farmers.

Food Forests

Contour Lines plants diverse agroforestry sites, or “food forests,” over 12k sites planted to date. These sites have rows of fruit trees for production, as well as legume support trees for shade, mulch and natural fertilizer. Between these tree rows we plant banana, cassava, pineapple and other crops for shorter term harvests.

Most of these sites are in rural, indigenous communities in Guatemala, where we transition the land use from chemical, slash-and-burn monocultures to these organic, perennial food forests planted on Contour. This reduces soil erosion and builds fertility (and improves other ecosystem functions like carbon sequestration, biodiversity and water filtration) while also providing families with both greater income and nutrition.

  • Regenerative Agroforestry

Where We Work

Contour Lines works at an international scale, and is currently expanding into four countries. So far we work in 374 villages throughout Guatemala and 12 different states in the USA.

Tree Planting Grant Application

Consulting Services

Contour Lines offers consulting and educational services.  We design and consult for farmers/landowners transitioning their land to renegerative uses.  We also consult nonprofits seeking to achieve impacts through our Community Engagement Model.

Superior Survival Rates

Our projects consistently result in 90% seedling survival rates and higher. Over the past 5 years of experience we’ve developed our Community Engagement Model, thanks in large part to “Two Ears of Corn” by Roland Bunch, as well as the feedback and local knowledge of our team of field technicians, all of whom are from the same indigenous communities in which we work. This model has been the key to our success. It requires farmers to use soil conservation methods by written aggreement, and after starting small the first season, it increases grant-size each season with each farmer based on performance following strict supervision, only with those farmers who’ve complied with these required methods.

Further contributing to high survival rates are the community organizing efforts, the long term relation-building and the follow-up visits to each community, during which our technicians deliver essential tools, training, and annual seeds as well as assistance with marketing of the harvests, all of which keep farmers willing and able to continue maintaining these sites. Afterall, it is these smallholder famers working hard on their own land for their own benefit which keeps our projects expanding and success rates high.

Expotential Scalability With our Community Engagement model that awards more trees to farmers each year our number of trees increases each year. Meanwhile, our network of 374 communities continues to expand, as the demand for Contour Lines projects grows each season. Key to this scalability are our replicable models across all teams.

Our Team

Contour Lines large-scale and cost-efficient success depends on our team of field technicians. These 18 techs are local, primarily youth from Q’echi communities, many of whom began as project recipients and through dedication arose to become leaders themselves.

Now each is responsible for their own sector, organizing communities, designing and planting sites, training participants and now assisting with export of harvests. Each works semi-autonomously, seeking out their own regions and building up their own teams of sub-techs (now over 60 total). Through their work with Contour Lines, these technicians become not only leaders in their communities, but also, thanks to their value feedback and local knowledge, crucial contributors to the Contour Lines’ models.

Contour Lines’ team of field technicians.. plus groups of interns from Ak’tenamit.