The Silvestre Family Farm

There is an ancient farming method still practiced by only a handful of family farms in Mexico today: Milpa, the original three sisters system, where corn, beans, and squash are grown together in one field, each one supporting the others. It's older than the Aztec Empire, rooted in indigenous agricultural tradition, and it's how Edgar Montes Silvestre and his brother Pedro grow our Ayocote Arcoiris — carrying forward both the method and the ancestral seed itself.

Edgar and Pedro farm in the mountains near Atlixco, in the volcanic highlands of Puebla — the same broader region where the Ayocote bean was first domesticated thousands of years ago. Atlixco sits in the shadow of the Popocatépetl volcano, its valley fed by mountain streams running down from snowmelt, and its soil enriched by the volcanic belt that runs through this part of Mexico. It's a landscape built for growing: this same valley has sustained corn, beans, and squash farming since long before Spanish colonization, and Milpa remains the traditional way small farms here work the land.

The Ayocote Arcoiris grows in Edgar and Pedro's Milpa plot — the method Edgar learned from his grandfather. Corn gives the climbing bean plants something to hold onto, the beans feed the soil with nitrogen for the corn, and squash's broad leaves shade the ground to hold in moisture and choke out weeds. It's demanding work for a smaller harvest than a single-crop field would yield, but because Ayocotes are naturally resilient, the beans in this system need no added fertilizer or pesticide, and if one crop underperforms in a given year, there's almost always another to fall back on. Edgar studied agriculture in college hoping to learn how to farm Milpa more efficiently, only to find the traditional method wasn't taught at all — so he built that knowledge himself, and today other farmers in the region buy their seed from him.

We partner with La Comandanta, a Mexican mission-based company working directly with small family farms like Edgar and Pedro's to rescue ancestral bean varieties at risk of disappearing — helping farmers like them keep traditions like Milpa alive for the next generation.

*Photographs courtesy of The Heirloom Bean Co.