For over 3000 years, Hopi dryland farmers have brought abundance out of the American desert Southwest by carefully cooperating with the landscape to develop sophisticated agricultural practices. The Hopi’s sophisticated approach to agriculture sustains the land and people and produces corn and other crops in a region where modern hybrids struggle. Indigenous conservation practices are often referred to as traditional ecological knowledge, or “a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmissions, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and their environments.” Hopi dryland farmers employ planting and conservation techniques to grow crops, such as corn, beans, and squash, in a semiarid region without irrigation. Hopi farmers have deliberately shaped their methods and practices into a suite of place-based conservation practices. Through different environmental conditions, they have successfully adapted and maintained agricultural systems using few inputs and local materials. Many of the rules are ingenious solutions to meeting the common problems of maintaining soil productivity and providing moisture necessary for successful crop production. Hopi farmers’ underlying philosophical foundation or “land ethic” is tied directly to their belief system, grounded in land stewardship and faith that the land will support them if they take care of the land. Hopi people believe Masaw to be the guardian of this earth. In the lives of traditional Hopi people lies the way of Masaw, a form of humility and simplicity and that of forging a sacred bond between themselves and the land that sustains them. The Hopi perceive the earth as their mother, the one from whom they were born and receive their sustenance and to whom they will return after death. As a result, Hopi farmers tend to view their fields with great reverence and respect, and great care is taken to have minimal impact on the environment.