A look at the ‘transformative’ effect beavers have had on an Aspen-area testing ground for regenerative agriculture: The Farm Collaborative is a multi-purpose regenerative farm, camp, school and resource center, now leveraging knowledge from beavers to improve water amid drought — The #Aspen Times

Click the link to read the article on The Aspen Times website (Lis Longwell). Here’s an excerpt:

August 12, 2026

Three years ago, beavers returned to an Aspen-area testing ground for regenerative agriculture. What’s happened since has been nothing short of transformative, according to Eden Vardy, who started The Farm Collaborative in 2008 with the ambitious goal of finding solutions to climate change.

“Everything has transformed, there’s been just so much new growth in the riparian area. We’re starting to see predatory birds explore; I’ve seen a handful of golden eagles and bald eagles and a lot more coyotes and foxes coming into the area. But the most significant is the growth of the water table…This year, when we were anticipating our smallest year of water ever — which it still is, we are now starting to go dry — we had easily two months of more water than we thought we would this year as a result of really the storage systems that the beavers developed for us,” Vardy said…

Beavers’ role as a keystone species and ecosystem engineers has been increasingly recognized by scientists, environmentalists and water providers as an effective means of increasing drought resiliency. A project at Rocky Mountain National Park mimicking beavers has received notoriety for its early success in restoring wetland benefits to a drying landscape. Colorado Parks and Wildlife, during a time when Vardy served on its commission, responded to beavers’ growing popularity with a strategy to guide future species’ conservation and management. In July, the state agency also released beavers in two state wildlife areas near Rifle amid some man-made beaver structures to restore riparian ecosystems…

Today, The Farm Collaborative — through youth and community programming as well as farmer support efforts — is focused on helping individuals explore and understand regenerative agriculture. The practice includes efforts to improve soil health, restore biodiversity and enhance water management…

“We are in a dust bowl again right now, just like we were during the Great Depression,” Vardy said. “Our tactics in agriculture, while productive, can have an adverse impact on the land in a way that prohibits our capacity to grow food, and regeneration is just utilizing the land differently, incorporating different techniques — instead of tilling, you can crimp from a grain operation, adding animals to the landscape for fertilization and soil building, cover cropping, crop rotations.”

Regeneration is not, however, simply an altruistic endeavor, he said. 

“A beaver doesn’t show up in a water system because it’s altruistic and it wants to see more trout, more insects or more biodiversity; the beaver shows up because it wants to eat willow and it wants to raise its family in a healthy and comfortable way,” he said. “The byproduct of that work is that all these cascading biological effects take place.”

In the same way, regenerative agriculture is about making farms productive in the long term in a way that “restores the cascading effects for biology around the farm,” he added.