Soil to soil. No trace. Full Circle. Chef-owned, ranch-rooted, regenerative by design — Net Zero Ranch closes the loop in Northern New Mexico.
Chef Kualani Kennedy grew up on a cattle and horse ranch in Missouri. Her father was a permaculture teacher and the first certified organic commercial farmer in Hawaii — both parents raised her by a homesteading rule: care for the animals and the land that fed you. She went on to earn her own permaculture design certification in New York.
Kualani founded NZR after thirty years in kitchens — Michelin-star sous chef stints, graduate of the Culinary Institute, then decades as a private chef — that took her from New York through San Francisco to a ranch in Northern New Mexico.
"The only way to deliver a meal worth remembering is to know exactly where the food comes from."— Chef Kualani Kennedy
NZR sources from organic and regenerative New Mexico ranches and farms — then takes the meal all the way back to the soil it came from. The loop closes. Full Circle.
Net Zero Ranch is named for one. Chef Kualani's home sits off-grid in the Sangre de Cristos — an old hunting A-frame that runs entirely on the sun, drawing its water from a well on the land.
Heat comes from oak cut on the property and a pellet stove; every appliance — the oven, even the induction stovetop — runs on the sun. Her horses' manure is composted and returned to the same ground it came from.
The loop she lives at home is the loop she built the company on.
Net Zero Ranch closes the full loop in Northern New Mexico — taking the meal all the way back to the ground it came from. Nine steps. One closed system.
Local cattle raised on grass that rebuilds the soil. Organic farms supplying produce, herbs, and seasonal ingredients across Northern New Mexico. The growers and ranchers are the first link in the loop.
Wood-smoked low and slow by NZR's smokehouse partner — eighteen hours of patience and hardwood.
Cooking live-fire on site. The grills set up at your venue. The fire is the centerpiece of the event.
Eating around your table. Your guests, your wedding, your night. This is the moment everything points toward.
Straight into the compost bin. Biodegradable serviceware. Nothing rinsed into the trash, nothing landfilled.
Hauled to a commercial composting facility. The waste from your wedding starts its second life.
Turned into rich fertilizer. The food on your table, transformed.
Santa Fe homeowners, gardeners, and landscapers buy the finished soil. Your wedding goes into their gardens.
Your wedding feeds next year's tomato beds, herb gardens, and native landscapes.
Then the loop closes. The garden feeds the rancher. The rancher feeds your next event. Full Circle.
Before the fire, before the table — it starts in the soil. The trilogy of films that defined the regenerative movement, in the order they were released.
of carbon dioxide can be pulled from the atmosphere and stored in each acre of regeneratively farmed soil, every year — turning farmland from a source of emissions into a sink.
What does carbon have to do with your event?
When we burn fossil fuels — gas, oil, coal — we release carbon dioxide into the air. It's the gas at the heart of a warming planet. Plants do the exact opposite: through photosynthesis, they breathe that carbon dioxide in, use sunlight to turn it into food, and send the leftover carbon down into their roots and the soil — where healthy ground can lock it away for years.
Regenerative farms are built to keep as much of that carbon in the earth as possible. So when the food at your celebration comes from farms like these — and the plates and scraps are composted back into the ground — your meal isn't adding carbon to the sky. It's helping pull it back down.
Kiss the Ground · 2020 · Watch the Trailer
Common Ground · 2023 · Watch the Trailer
Groundswell · 2026 · Watch the Trailer
The average American wedding generates 400 to 600 pounds of garbage1 and roughly 63 tons of carbon dioxide1. An estimated 10 percent of food served at weddings is thrown away2, and with more than two million weddings every year in the United States3, the cumulative footprint is enormous — single-use serviceware, transported produce, and landfill disposal at scale. The catering industry has a chance to lead.
Net Zero Ranch is built to invert that math. With roughly 90 percent of ingredients sourced from organic and regenerative ranches and farms in Northern New Mexico, food-mile emissions drop dramatically4. Biodegradable serviceware plus composting through Reunity Resources diverts an estimated 80 percent of typical wedding waste from the landfill — cutting the per-wedding landfill footprint from 400-600 lbs to under 5 pounds — often just 2 to 35. And what little can't be composted or recycled is still biodegradable — designed to break down in under a year, not the centuries conventional plastic takes. Cooking fuel is oak harvested at the Net Zero Ranch itself, closing the energy loop.
"I used to weigh the trash at the end of every event. An entire wedding — under five pounds."— Chef Kualani Kennedy
Chef Kualani is the creative force behind NZR. Her captains, bakers, and chefs run the kitchen in Taos.
"We are always learning and refining. It's a constant theme with us."
— Chef Kualani Kennedy
Every Net Zero Ranch event is quoted at one transparent, all-inclusive price. What's on the proposal is what you pay — nothing added, nothing hidden.