Neal Hegarty grew up on a dairy farm in Ireland, which turns out to be the best possible preparation for a life spent working out why modern agriculture is broken and what to do about it.
After a BSc and a Masters in Sustainable Development at University College Cork, he went to Guatemala and never really left. In the years that followed he worked deep in the field: learning ancestral farming techniques from indigenous communities, supporting community seed banks, and leading syntropic agroforestry projects across the Lake Atitlán watershed.
What began as development work became something more personal. Neal co-founded Granja Tz'ikin, a regenerative farm, farm-to-table restaurant and community hub that is now the living centrepiece of a wider effort to restore one of the world's most extraordinary lakes.
He is also the founder and CEO of CreaSol Permaculture, a design firm that has helped regenerate thousands of hectares across Latin America and beyond, applying permaculture design principles to retreat centres, homesteads, cacao farms and rotational grazing operations alike.
Neal's work sits exactly at the intersection Our Collective Edge was built to explore, where ancient ecological intelligence meets rigorous modern design thinking. His belief is simple: the tools nature has spent four billion years refining are the most sophisticated decision-making frameworks we have. Learning to read them fluently is not a return to the past. It is the most practical thing a person can do for the future.
Within Our Collective Edge, Neal sets the design standard. He holds the technical bar for every land project, and mentors and certifies the designers who carry the work across the network, so the same rigour shows up whether the site is a highland food forest or a high-desert farm.