Yellowhorn Falls — Las Cruces, New Mexico
We plant things we may never
see bloom.
We do it anyway.
Worker-owned veterinary access. Ecological research. Whole-life community care in the Chihuahuan Desert borderlands.
Yellowhorn Falls — Las Cruces, New Mexico
Worker-owned veterinary access. Ecological research. Whole-life community care in the Chihuahuan Desert borderlands.
Our Story
Yellowhorn Falls was founded on a straightforward premise: that sustainable, community-centered care requires infrastructure — not just programs.
We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, a 144-year irrevocable land trust, and a worker-owned cooperative in formation. These three structures function as an integrated ecosystem, designed to protect land, sustain labor, and deliver lasting public benefit to underserved communities in southern New Mexico.
Our founders bring combined decades of direct experience inside veterinary and public health systems — knowledge of where resources flow, where care fails to follow, and which communities are consistently underserved. Yellowhorn Falls was built to address those gaps directly and durably.
Our three core structures:
Yellowhorn Falls 501(c)(3) holds research, education, and public-benefit programming — including Node Cero Mobile Veterinary Outreach, which delivers essential veterinary services directly to Doña Ana and Luna County communities.
The Organix Codex Land Trust protects land and community assets across a 144-year horizon — ensuring that the infrastructure built today remains protected for future generations.
The Worker-Owned Cooperative (in formation) centers the people who provide direct care, building long-term economic stability for the practitioners and communities we serve.
Yellowhorn Research is the knowledge arm of this ecosystem — conducting applied research on desert agriculture, land stewardship, and sustainable systems in the Chihuahuan Desert. This is long-horizon work, designed to generate tools, data, and practices that remain useful well beyond any single grant cycle.
These structures are not parallel programs. They are interdependent: the land trust holds the ground, the cooperative holds the care, and the research holds the knowledge. Together, they form a system built for permanence.
Yellowhorn Falls is not a crisis response. It is a long-term investment in the communities, land, and care systems of southern New Mexico. 🌿
Our Mission
Yellowhorn Falls exists to build — not to respond.
The communities we serve across Doña Ana and Luna County are generative: knowledgeable, resilient, and consistently underserved. Our work focuses on expanding access, strengthening local capacity, and creating systems that allow resources, care, and knowledge to circulate more equitably within the regions that need them most.
We build for longevity. Every program, partnership, and dollar we steward is measured against one standard: will this still be working in a hundred years?
Rooted in the Chihuahuan Desert, Yellowhorn Falls operates as an integrated ecosystem — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, a 144-year irrevocable land trust, and a worker-owned cooperative in formation. We partner alongside communities that have always carried and sustained one another, designing models that support continuity, dignity, and long-term resilience.
We are planting a 144-year ecosystem — built to support land, care, and community for generations to come.
Our True North
What We Build
Choose where you want to go.
Free and sliding-scale at-home pet euthanasia. No family left alone at the end. Not one more.
Enter
Worker-owned mobile veterinary cooperative serving Luna County and Doña Ana County. We go where the care isn't.
EnterYellowhorn cultivation research in the Chihuahuan Desert. Building the first U.S. field dataset for Xanthoceras sorbifolium — P-001 and P-002 underway.
Learn MoreKatherine Archer's ecological art practice — living installations rooted in land, memory, and material. La Changa's Archive is the inaugural collection.
Enter the GalleryA natural burial sanctuary integrated with ecological land stewardship. 25-acre target in Luna County. Where grief and land share the same soil.
Learn MoreNational certification for at-home pet euthanasia practitioners. Building the standard — the training, the credential, the ethical and clinical framework — for veterinary professionals who bring end-of-life care home.
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End-of-Life Care
The Flower Fund provides free and sliding-scale at-home pet euthanasia for families in southern New Mexico who cannot afford or access clinic-based end-of-life care. We believe the final goodbye belongs at home — with the people and places an animal companion loves, not in a fluorescent waiting room or a padded kennel alone.
Many families in the region live paycheck to paycheck, juggle multiple jobs, or lack the transportation or flexibility to reach a clinic during business hours. For them, the decision to euthanize a beloved companion often comes with the added weight of cost, distance, and logistics. The Flower Fund exists to remove that burden — to make it possible for a family to stay in their own space, with their own routines, and with the comfort of being surrounded by the people who matter most.
It is not a compromise. It is a choice: the choice to say goodbye on the couch, in the yard, in the hallway where the dog walked for years, or the bed where the cat lived her life. The Flower Fund understands that euthanasia is not just a medical act but a social and emotional one — and that the environment in which it happens is as important as the act itself.
The Flower Fund is named after a greyhound who came in on a cold January night and stayed until she couldn’t anymore. She was called “Mah Baby Flowah” by the people who loved her, and she carried the kind of quiet dignity that made every goodbye into a kind of celebration.
Flower showed us what it means to witness a life all the way to the end — with presence, with whipped cream, with the kind of love that doesn’t need to explain itself. She taught us that the last moments of a life are not just a clinical endpoint but a sacred threshold, and that the way we honor that threshold matters as much as the way we live the rest of it.
The Flower Fund exists as a living commitment to the idea that every family, no matter their income or geography, deserves the right to bring their companion home for the final goodbye.
Mobile Veterinary Cooperative
Node Cero Mobile Veterinary Cooperative
Node Cero Mobile Veterinary Cooperative is Yellowhorn Falls' first ground-level project — a worker-owned, mobile veterinary service built by and for the people of Doña Ana and Luna County colonias. It exists because if care won't come to the people, then the care has to move.
Families in the colonias drive 60 to 90 minutes for basic animal care — not because they don't love their animals, but because no one built the infrastructure for them. Node Cero removes that distance. We bring the care directly to the streets, yards, and community spaces where people actually live.
Every van is both a clinic and a statement. The workers who drive it and open the back doors are from the same communities that receive care — members of the cooperative, not just employees. That shift — from "service providers" to "each other" — changes everything: it becomes care that is accountable, continuous, and grounded in lived experience.
Veterinarians and CVTs who join the cooperative hold equity in what they build. Sliding-scale pricing means no family is turned away.
Through The Flower Fund, every Node Cero clinic carries the capacity to be there at the end of life — at home, with presence, at no cost.
Node Cero is not a band-aid. It is a refusal to wait for a system that has never prioritized colonia communities. It is a working model of what accessible, community-centered veterinary care can look like — mobile, affordable, and co-owned by the people who provide it.
Notify me of upcoming events
Clinical partner details coming soon. Get in touch to learn more about joining Node Cero's founding cohort.
Ride With UsCertification · Coming Soon
The Crossing Protocol
National certification for at-home pet euthanasia practitioners
The Crossing Protocol is a national certification program for veterinary professionals who bring companion end-of-life care into the homes where pets live, love, and are loved.
We are building the standard — the training, the credential, the ethical and clinical framework — for the growing movement of CVTs, DVMs, and other veterinary professionals who believe that no animal should die on a stainless-steel table, surrounded by strangers.
At the heart of the protocol is a radical idea: every pet should be surrounded by the people they love, in the safety and familiarity of their own home, when they cross over.
The technical precision of veterinary medicine, fused with the emotional labor of presence, listening, and holding space — this is the work. It is not just about delivering a dose. It is about reading the room, honoring the family, and being fully present for the moment when a life ends and a relationship is honored.
The Crossing Protocol is not a checklist. It is a living standard — a framework that supports kindness, competence, and consent at every step.
It exists for the CVT and the DVM who knows that medicine is only as good as the way it is held. And it exists for the families who need to know that the professional at their door is trained, credentialed, and anchored in the same belief: that death at home is not a last resort. It is a choice.
Community Partners & Sponsors
Nusenda Credit Union is Yellowhorn Falls' founding financial partner — rooted in New Mexico, committed to community, and among the first institutions to invest in this ecosystem. Their support makes our inaugural Node Cero community clinics possible.
We are actively building our sponsor family. If your organization believes in worker ownership, rural veterinary access, ecological research, or grief-grounded community care — there is a place for you here.
Start a Conversation →Ride With Us
Whether you're a veterinarian in southern New Mexico, a researcher interested in yellowhorn, a family who needs The Flower Fund, a grant-maker who sees what we're building, or someone who just lost something and needed to find us — you're in the right place. Send us a message. We'll find the door together.