The eight-hour HUD-approved course most down-payment assistance programs require, and what it covers: credit, budgeting, mortgage types, closing costs, and what owning a home costs after the closing.

Biochar holds water and nutrients in soil for centuries and locks carbon out of the atmosphere while it does it. How it is made by pyrolysis, how to charge it before it goes in the ground, and where it fits on a building site.

Small farms in northern New Mexico hold seed stock, dryland growing knowledge and acequia water rights that industrial agriculture has no equivalent for - and the farmers market is where that knowledge changes hands.

What the Academy does locally: workshops open to the public, training that keeps skilled trades in the county, and scholarships for students who cannot reach a campus session without one.

Taos has forty years of built Earthships to learn from, which makes it the one place where the whole approach can be studied in buildings that have already been through four decades of winters.

Sustainable building has a labor problem, not a demand problem. How the Academy trains crews who can pound a tire wall, size an array and read a site.

Why a design-build company started a non-profit trade school: one builder puts up dozens of homes a year, and a trained workforce puts up thousands.

Students come from most continents, and the projects they take home are what the curriculum gets tested against. How the Academy network works in practice.

The Taos campus is a working ranch, so the food, water and waste systems students study are the ones feeding and supplying them while they are there.

Fourteen courses and 274 lessons covering structure, water, waste, energy, food and comfort as one system. What the online track covers and what still needs your hands on the material.