The fourteen acres Nick DiDomenico started farming in 2015 — what would become Elk Run Farm — were not promising. The soil was compacted, the vegetation sparse, the land's ability to absorb water nearly gone. A visiting member of the NRCS assessed the parcel and concluded it wasn't worth farming. It was exactly the kind of place where you learn what regeneration actually requires.

​

Nick began applying what he'd learned from permaculturists and indigenous farmers in Central America. He built swales to slow, spread, and sink the water. He utilized chickens, pigs, and sheep to turn and fertilize a compacted dirt parking lot until it was ready for crops, and he planted what he could. Slowly, the land responded. Soil organic matter climbed. Vegetation thickened. The site that had been written off became the proof that something different was possible.

​

Marissa Pulaski, a trained herbalist and community builder, saw something else taking shape at Elk Run — not just a land management demonstration, but a place where people could reconnect with the systems that sustain them. Together in 2017, Nick and Marissa founded Drylands Agroecology Research, and the work grew quickly: education programs, food donation, postpartum care and community ceremony, and land stewardship. Each was a different expression of the same conviction: that healing land and healing community are inseparable. Over time, DAR has refined its efforts, focusing on the practices that most directly catalyze the land's own regenerative capacity and its potential to support life and community — perennial food and medicine systems, integrated land management, and the research that makes the work honest and transferable.

​

What hasn't changed is the underlying purpose. The land-human relationship is not incidental to this work. It is the work. People who tend land together, who eat from it and learn from it and take responsibility for it, develop a different orientation toward the living world. That shift, multiplied across a region, is what a livable future actually depends on.