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"How societies use their land and who owns that land determines how people live, who flourishes, who falters, and who has a say in what happens next."

Land Power:  How Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, by Michael Albertus, 2025.

We believe the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now. At Holocia, we are planting the seeds for a resilient bioregional food future for Austin.

For too long, our community has relied on a fragile food system that imports over 99% of its food and labor from thousands of miles away. This isn't just a logistical challenge; it's a threat to our health, our local economy, and our environment. We founded Holocia to change this narrative by building tangible assets for human, community, and planetary health.

As the Co-Founders of Holocia, we are pioneering a new model for community-owned agriculture. We use a powerful but underused tool in Texas law—the Agricultural Development District (ADD)—to organize homeowners to collectively finance, own, and control their own food supply chain. Our innovative financial model uses tax-free municipal bonds, paid back by CSA sales and secured by member assessments, to create a low-cost, self-sustaining economic engine that makes local, regenerative farming viable at scale.

The impact is transformative. Our first project is designed to generate $10 million in local revenue, provide 5,000 households with nutrient-dense food, and create a secure pathway for the next generation of farmers by solving the critical challenge of land access. We are building a circular system from the ground up—one that eliminates toxic plastics and builds true community wealth.

Our work is grounded in a proven track record of financial stewardship and operational expertise, including managing over $2 million in complex USDA grant projects and hands-on experience in farm operations and soil health.

We are always eager to connect with fellow innovators, impact investors, community leaders, and anyone passionate about building resilient, equitable community-based food systems. If you believe it's time to plant the tree for a healthier future, let's connect.

Our Leadership Team

We realized that we could combine regenerative community financing with a smaller project of Nature Farms, which would become the Minimum Viable Project that we have struggled to define, letting go of the requirement that a project would need to include housing in order to prove the concept.
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Karin Ascot

Co-Founder

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Patrick Van Haren

Co-Founder and CEO

Integrity

Integrity as a virtue and the skill of integrating many disciplines share a deep conceptual connection, especially when viewed through the lens of wholeness and coherence.a

Wholeness

The root of integrity comes from the Latin integritas, meaning "wholeness" or "completeness." A person with integrity aligns their values, actions, and words into a cohesive whole. Similarly, integrating multiple disciplines means weaving together different fields into a unified, functional system—creating intellectual integrity in solutions.

Consistency & Coherence

Just as moral integrity demands internal consistency (walking the talk), successful interdisciplinary thinking requires coherence—ensuring that insights from different domains align into a non-contradictory, harmonious whole. Without integrity, either moral or intellectual, fragmentation leads to dysfunction.

Truth & Truth-Seeking

A person with integrity seeks truth rather than convenience. Similarly, integrating disciplines effectively requires intellectual honesty—avoiding dogma, questioning assumptions, and seeking the most accurate synthesis rather than favoring one field over another for personal or ideological reasons.

Strength & Resilience

Integrity in character creates resilience in adversity, just as integrated, multi-disciplinary solutions are more robust than siloed approaches. Regenerative agriculture, for example, works because it integrates soil science, ecology, economics, and traditional farming wisdom into a stronger, more adaptive system.

Wayfinding

In a wayfinding sense, integrity is about staying true to a guiding principle despite complexity. Integrative thinking does the same—navigating across disciplines to find a coherent path forward rather than getting lost in conflicting perspectives.

At its core, both integrity and integrative thinking are about holding things together in a meaningful way, ensuring strength, coherence, and resilience in both character and innovation.

Our Partners:

The Great Challenges

Help Stop the Dysfunction!

Supporting Nature Farms and Nature Towns builds Regenerative Places
UPF

Ultra Processed Foods

Plastics

Single Use Plastics

Sprawl

Sprawl

Food Waste

Food Waste

Chemicals

Industrial Agriculture

CAFO

Confined Animal Feeding Operations

We Are Just Beginning. Come Join Our Journey

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