86 Paula Costa and Valter Ziantoni, scaling agroforestry by complexifying growing systems using software

In this episode with Paula Costa and Valter Ziantoni of Pretaterra, an innovative way of thinking complex and regenerative ancestral production systems for a changing planet, we unpack the wonders of agroforestry, the opportunities, the challenges and why it is having its breakthrough now.

-----------------------------------------------------

Welcome to Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food.
Join our Gumroad community, discover the tiers and benefits here: www.gumroad.com/investinginregenag.
Other ways to support our work:
- Share the podcast
- Give a 5-star rating
- Or buy us a coffee… or a meal!
www.Ko-fi.com/regenerativeagriculture.

------------------------------------------------------

Koen van Seijen interviews Paula Costa and Valter Ziantoni of Pretaterra about the wonders of agroforestry. They also discuss how to systemize agroforestry design, complexify growing systems, as well as the financial aspect of design planning.

More about this episode on: https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/2020/07/21/paula-costa-valter-ziantoni.

-----------------------------------------------------------

For feedback, ideas, suggestions please contact us through Twitter @KoenvanSeijen, or get in touch through the website www.investinginregenerativeagriculture.com.

Join our newsletter on www.eepurl.com/cxU33P.

The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

S

Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/

Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today, we unpack the wonders of agroforestry. What are the opportunities, the challenges, the myths, and why is it having its breakthrough moment now? Which is not a moment too late, as we need to plant billions of trees as soon as possible. Plus, how to systematize agroforestry design and complexify growing systems. Welcome to another episode of In March last year, we launched our membership community to make it easy for fans to support our work. And so many of you have joined as a member. We've launched different types of benefits, exclusive content, Q&A webinars with former guests, ask me anything sessions, plus so much more to come in the future. For more information on the different tiers, benefits and how to become a member, check gumroad.com slash investing region. an egg or find the link below thank you Welcome to another episode, today with Pretaterra, an innovative way of thinking complex and regenerative ancestral production systems for a changing planet. They develop replicable designs of regenerative agroforestry systems, combining scientific data, empirical information, and traditional knowledge with technological innovations, building a new and productive paradigm that is sustainable, resilient, and long-lasting. Welcome, Paula and Walter.

SPEAKER_03 1:47

Hello, Cohen. Thank you so much for the invitation. We are so glad to be here with you, and thank Thank you for the introduction.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Yeah, thank you, Coy. I think you said everything

SPEAKER_00 1:57

about Pretaterra already. I just took it from your website, so actually you said it. To start with a personal question, a bit of background on both of you. What brought you to regenerative agriculture, agroforestry? Why are you working on soil?

SPEAKER_03 2:11

Okay, so first of all, I am a biologist and a forest engineer, and I started my work working with forest regeneration, forest restoration, and forest management. as a biologist. And then afterwards, I studied forest engineering so that I could understand how human beings could manage the forest for their livelihoods. So the idea was that I understood that as human beings, we couldn't just plant forest to preserve it, but we should plant forest to produce, to make our living from it. And from that point on, I started working with agroforestry systems or complex production system that looks like the forest so first I understood how the forest worked and then I started to plan productive systems that were inspired in the forest and that's how I started to work with soil start working with regeneration and with agroforestry

SPEAKER_01 3:17

yeah for me it was pretty much the same but I'm a forest engineer also a master in agroforestry I have an MSc in agroforestry and I'm looking for this specific master to understand more about agroforestry. Since my first year of studies in the university as an engineer, I looked and studied a lot about agroforestry, especially here in Brazil where we are now. There are things happening, not that much that are now, but there are a lot to do, to learn and I learned as much as I could. I went for this master, I learned even more, so then I I started to work in Africa where I did my thesis and everything and with communities. So I'm passionate about people and how things work and why they work and why they don't. So my real field of work is local knowledge. So understanding why people do what they do and what they understand for the very nature that you don't know how to systematize yet, but we can. So I started to study this as much as I could also And agroforestry was always there, like it permeated all the fields of study I did. So I believe that everything you're going to do has to be with a scientific view, but with a human livelihood, local knowledge overview of all this. So that's my passion on agroforestry.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

And was it easy to find a master on that? I mean, you said I specifically searched for it, which sort of suggests it wasn't that easy. And the second part to the question, was that livelihood focus and local community knowledge focus. Was that part of the master or did you bring that into your thesis?

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Well, it wasn't easy or it was actually because there is only one in the world. You can study agroforestry, of course. You can do a master or a PhD on agroforestry, studying interactions between species or designing our space and our stratification or anything that goes with agroforestry. But to do a specific master on agroforestry, there is only one in the world that is in Bangor in the UK Wales it's a very good and old school and they are really good even though that's in Europe in North Europe in Great Britain you can still learn a lot because the professors they came from e-craft and other organizations so it's really important master and so it was easy to find since it was only one and I brought quite a lot of local knowledge into my thesis because you could go for in But I worked with aircraft afterwards. So I developed my business in Zambia, working with four different, three different tribes, actually, communities there. And the whole approach was about how to take the right decisions based on local knowledge. So, yeah, I brought it in. And I have been working in Amazon before and after. So I tried to merge how human beings think all over the world, despite where they come from or what background they have.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

And how did Pretatera come about? Because going from what you studied, obviously, starting a company is in some cases a huge step, in other cases, a very small step. In your both cases, what triggered the start of that company?

SPEAKER_03 6:38

Well, actually, it was a big step for us. We both have a long story working as independent consultants, but we met actually working in Fazenda da Toca, which is one of the biggest organic farms in Brazil, where we had the opportunity to develop a way to systematize the agroforestry logics into a large-scale framework. So there in Fazenda da Toca, we understood that we had this huge demand of other farmers, other people who are looking for this kind of knowledge, because so far people were only discussing agroforestry for smallholder farmers, not in a large scale. And only in Fazenda da Toca that we really started discussing this logic of large scale. And we had all the time people asking us if we could help them to plan a system to implement in their own lands. They were looking for this. And then we said, well, we should start an initiative that we could spread this to more people, not only in one farm, but to more people.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

Can you describe that farm a bit? You say a large scale, just for people that have never heard about it, have never seen it. How many hectares, what kind of acres, what kind of trees are we talking about?

SPEAKER_03 8:04

It's a large, large farm, actually.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Yeah,

SPEAKER_01 8:07

2,300 hectares.

SPEAKER_03 8:10

It's a very large farm. It's not everything in agroforestry, of course. So we had, I would say we implemented close to 100 hectares of agroforestry focused on seed on lemon for exportation. And so we planted along with the lemon, we had bananas, we had African mahogany, we had eucalyptus, we had native species for biodiversity and for biomass production, and also the grass management in between the rows of trees. So

SPEAKER_02 8:46

the

SPEAKER_03 8:46

focus of Fazenda da Toca is not only agroforestry, it's organic production of especially eggs, for organic eggs production. And so they also work with grains, organic grains, for the chicken, for feeding the chicken.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

I just want to add, it's over 5,000 acres, the Fazenda da Toca, and we were by this time the chiefs of the RD section, so the research and development section of Fazenda da Toca. So we came in to develop the designs, the proper designs that were economically viable enough to the ROI and all the estimations, the economical estimations that could be. So you work with the whole management process of the creation of those first systems.

SPEAKER_03 10:09

And that's what we scaled in Fazenda da Toca and now they are with another initiative, another company called Rizoma, where they are scaling up even more in other regions of Brazil.

SPEAKER_01 10:22

That's a spin-off from Fazenda da Toca and we were there when they first

SPEAKER_00 10:26

start also.

SPEAKER_03 10:27

Yeah, they have an amazing work.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

And then you were approached by others and you thought, okay, let's set up a company to do this multiple times in different continents as well, because you've worked in Indonesia, a lot in Africa, in Brazil. So what was that phase after leaving that farm and leaving the place where you could experiment this to start doing this on your own and with other farms?

SPEAKER_01 10:48

Yeah, actually, together we have over almost 30 years of experience in agroforestry. So it was not that big step as we thought but end up being we basically were doing consulting while being there and at the same time creating our own ideas philosophy and beliefs on agroforestry and how to change and how to break paradigms and then when we first start we already have potential clients and it starts to grow like exponentially and we start to make it better and better and systematize our own process so it's It has been a huge wave, actually. We didn't expect that it would be that big, that you could help so many people at the same time and go beyond boundaries that we thought you'd be in. And

SPEAKER_03 11:39

it grew very fast because in the beginning, we were understanding what our clients or what the people that we were going to work with, they were looking for, what they needed. And so we talked with a lot of people and we understood that what they need is a proper design, a proper planning of the system, a complex system.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Design is the key. So walk us through a typical client or actually an example if you want to share, but choose what you want. And how do you go about finding that design and thus your approach?

SPEAKER_01 12:13

Well, we have, I think I can describe, you have several kinds of clients. Since smallholder farmers, smallholder farmers that we take very much care and we respect a because they help us to build not only portfolio but experience and we can help these people that otherwise would be not having this kind of literature or knowledge available easily so we can spread the word but we also have NGOs companies and big investors and impact investors you want to describe a little bit

SPEAKER_03 12:49

so the logics pretty much it's always the same depends it varies on the scale that we are working working so for instance one work we did in partnership with WRI in the Amazon and so they hired us to plan and implement an agroforestry system with smallholder farmers with local communities that were looking for regenerate their soil because we have this very serious problem in the Amazon that smallholder farmers even though they are settled now they use a kind of agriculture which is last year burn that is very ancient, but it's not sustainable anymore if you don't let the soil rest for enough time. And so what we were looking for was a design specific for these farmers and for this context. And so we understood what we do in the first place is like a diagnostic. We understand all the context. We do all the local knowledge, acquirement, assessment. So we understand what is it that they already cultivate, the crops, the species, what are the native species in the forest, the species that they like to manage in the forest, they harvest in the forest, and what are the species that they already grow. Mainly there they used to plant cassava, that's the most important crop for them, and so necessarily the system had to have cassava for them. So we just complexified the cassava production.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

Yeah, we brought species together. This is one kind of client, as you but we have other ones like companies like Verstechen for instance or La Grama in Peru the work they do are very similar they are people that are trying to match or to meet the expectations of their clients that are buying those regenerative products or let's say organic so far and these companies they buy from out growers so they don't really own land but they try to improve the livelihoods of these people around the world, especially on the tropics. And basically they promote regenerative agriculture, organic agriculture, I would say. But now they are trying to have one more step on that, going into regenerative agriculture or agroforestry. So what we do is we go to their place, as Paulo just explained, we try to understand all the backgrounds, the expectations, the basic livelihood that people have, and we plan upon that a new agroforestry system that is adherential enough that could work for these people. And what the company starts to deliver is not just a premium price for their products, but also a regenerative system, a model that these forest-dependent people can use to improve their land while producing with enough profit to keep doing the kind of agriculture they do, but now improved. And I just want to compliment that what Pretatea does, what we do, is the whole process. We analyze, we plan, we implement, we train, we do capacity builds, we monitor, we do the whole process. So you literally go to the ground. Besides doing our own farm and the projects that you are around, we generally go and do at least the first plots and the first implementation we do ourselves, being present, understand the whole process.

SPEAKER_03 16:20

And it's important that we usually implement on the ground a few modules that can be replicable, that can be scaled up by them. So the farmers understand the system, they understand the logics and they would implement and grow it and make it in bigger areas or in their own lands. So that's pretty much what we did in La Grama. We planned a system for ginger and turmeric production for the high mountains in the Amazon, in the Peruvian Amazon and the idea would be it's not only organic. Organic is not enough. They're supposed to plant a system that is more biodiverse, like the environment where they are, like the landscape where they are, and that needs to be more resilient as well. So that's why we diversify their system. We put not only ginger and turmeric, but also fruits, also timber, also nuts, and also service species, also trees that were supposed to be pruned. to produce biomass and cover the soil? Yeah, before making it into

SPEAKER_00 17:30

a monologue, an office pays you to make more questions. No, I think it's extremely interesting. You mentioned the complexifying. I love the verb, complexifying. I think the move from one cash crop, which could be pepper or ginger or cassava or something going, I mean, it's very much obviously in line with regenerative agriculture, going away from monocultures, which sometimes is difficult to imagine when you are at know, a grain operator in the Midwest and you have to, you start maybe putting together different types of grain and harvesting in different times, obviously cover crops, et cetera. But when you are in agroforestry, it's sort of more natural, but also there, we often think of plantations of one type, maybe coffee or maybe something else. And that complexifying obviously brings a lot of questions with it. And I think that might be one of the reasons why agroforestry hasn't grown as much or is growing now instead of 40 years ago, 30 years ago, because the complexifying we've known and seen, but we haven't seen it, as you said before, at larger scale. So what is different now that suddenly you see all this activity at agroforestry beyond one acre or one hectare, but actually at 2,300 and large? People are talking about large agroforestry systems over the last, I think, five years, maybe before as well. But what has changed in your mind that suddenly agroforestry at larger scales is possible or seems possible?

SPEAKER_01 18:54

I just want to you one little statement here what we do that is different is to make a tailor-made design so that's what brings replicability i think you can answer your your question pretty well what has changed now but basically you have to keep in mind that this complexity that how to manage context specific yeah yeah it's context specific completely so you have it has to be tailor-made it has

SPEAKER_00 19:22

to be specifically for the area for the people but not to be annoying, but 40 years ago, it also had to be tailor-made. I mean, has the knowledge increased enormously? Do we have new technology that we suddenly know? Has we suddenly discovered this? Or what has changed in 2020 or 2015 when suddenly this boom of Ernst Goethe and a lot of other people, suddenly we are talking about scale and not small, cute things anymore, which is amazing, which is great. I'm very happy about it, but I'm wondering what changed. You have to make your knowledge. I

SPEAKER_03 19:54

would say that firstly, in the public policies, agroforestry was only focused for smallholder farmers. So this is the first thing that has been changing in the last few years because larger farmers are starting to take it seriously. I would say that this is the first thing. The second thing, many people actually ask us, why is it that agroforestry is not everywhere yet since it's so amazing, it's so perfect, it's so... solution for all the problems and actually the complexity it's a good thing but also it's a challenge the complexity is very difficult to manage people don't understand don't know how to manage complexity and that's the most difficult part of agroforestry because if you are a farmer and you have only one product you have to understand all the agronomic parts of this one crop you have to focus on the market for this only one crop and okay you can do that but once you grow to two crops to a crop and a nut or two crops a nut and a timber in the end of the system so you raise up the complexity so you have to plan very hard and what we did was to understand the system this complexity in a systematized way so the systematization for us is key is the most important thing so we have to plan every step we have to understand all the crops involved we have to understand all the management along the cycle so if we plan a system for 40 years we would have to know when do we plan to prune a timber tree which are the years that we are going to prune this timber tree so we have to build capacity for the people who are going to manage to prune timber trees so we have to know when we are going to prune the fruit trees we have to know how to prune service trees so it's a of complexity. So there is like a step-by-step process to systematize the design and to understand how to manage it all along the process. And most important of all is to plan the costs. You have to understand all the costs involved, not only in the implementation, but along the whole cycle. So if you understand, if you know every year, which are the management actions that you're going to take, you can predict a little bit. Of but you can predict how much is it going to cost. And if you know how much it's going to cost, you can start modeling it financially. And this is what was missing, actually. We have to plan the agroforestry system in a systematized way and in an economical way. We have to see how viable economically it will be. Because in Fazenda da Toca, for instance, we used to plant eucalyptus as a service species, but we have to prune... every year this eucalyptus. So how much does it cost to prune this eucalyptus? So we did this study all over again, understanding what is the operation to prune it, how much does it cost, which is how long does it take for the operators to do it.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

And this data wasn't there. There was no data set on pruning.

SPEAKER_03 23:16

There is no data. We have to produce this data.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

Most of the data on agroforestry, there isn't yet. I mean, as as machinery. We have a lot of machinery for agriculture and for forestry, but not agroforestry machinery. The same for data, because you have one specific data in one specific place in the world with this species and that. So when you try to complexify and use interactions between data, this big data of agroforestry, it is not there yet. But what you can do is create those kind of designs that are are modular, replicable, and elastic. So you can consider one species in a functional niche or in a functional group. So you can add several species to that same group. And it doesn't matter if you are implementing in Africa, in Europe, or in South America, in the tropics. We can go for a specific logic that we can apply succession and stratification. Just talking about the

SPEAKER_00 24:22

two main principles of agroforestry. Can you explain? Explain them a bit for anybody that hasn't dove deep into that yet.

SPEAKER_01 24:28

Yeah, so, well, succession is the time, while stratification are the floors. So basically every plant, we will occupy a specific floor, a specific layer of the forest, talking on the land like tridimensionally. So you're talking about the vertical occupation of those species. That's stratification, while succession is the timing they occur. So every time of the succession, so if you have one plant that lives one year, it's an annual plant, let's say, so it will stay there for one year. During this time, it will occupy a specific strata. And this strata can be high, upper high, medium, or low. So it doesn't matter. The plant will have a specific strata that it occupies. It doesn't matter the size it is or how high it is. So for every grass, it has a specific strata it occupies. Generally, it needs a lot of sun so it will be upper crown. But for trees, they have a lot of different kinds of possibilities. But those are the two main things you work on agroforestry to occupy this space, tridimensionally.

SPEAKER_03 25:57

So to sum up, succession would be how long the species or the group of species will stay in the system. So if you have a species that will last for 40 years and takes like five or six years to grow up. While it's growing, you can plant in the same point, in the same time, other species that are short period. So they won't compete with each other because the one that lasts longer is not big yet. So it's the same thing. You can plant maize over here with a Brazil nut right next to it because the Brazil nut is not going to compete with the corn, with the maize.

SPEAKER_00 26:37

Rather, it will be benefited by the shade. By the shade of it. Which, I mean, I just want to pause a second because for, I wouldn't say centuries, but for a long time, what you just explained was something that we couldn't understand, or at least if we grow corn or we grow one crop and you sort of thought about it as 2D, like only two dimensions, it either grows or doesn't grow. That's more like it. And you're basically saying, and everybody else who's working in agroforestry, let's look at it 3D because you have all the space up and down and you have time. So actually you're almost going 4D because you add the time component to it, which you have to plan for because it takes six years for this Brazil nut to grow up, which means you need six years of other cash flow. If you would only do that, you would have quite a big problem in your bank account. So it completely changes the discussion and makes it much more complex. And to that, actually, my question, this sounds amazing. And that's why probably everybody's saying agroforestry is the solution to any problem we ever had. But then if you start working with a smallholder farmer, how do you make sure that he or she has the space and time to think about that and to manage when you you leave a complex system like that? How do you make sure that any farmer that you've worked with, even if you're there in the beginning and you've worked with the pilot plots, et cetera, at some point you need to go to the next client. How do you make sure that that complexity and all that knowledge doesn't get lost?

SPEAKER_03 27:55

Yeah, we have to monitor, we have to be close, but we have to simplify and to explain before, right? So all of them, when we implement a system, they have like this gun chart of activity and ears at least. So they have to know, okay, I'm in the first year of my system. I have to prune the fruit trees. I have to prune my service trees. I have to clean, to cut down the grass in the middle. So we organize, we systematize the operations in a simple gun chart. That's just it. But you have to simplify it a little bit. Of course, you have the utopic agroforestry, super complex but you have the ideal agroforestry that is viable economically, that is viable technically for the farmer to manage. So that's why you have to simplify and to systematize the operations along the time.

SPEAKER_01 28:54

Yeah, and let's say that you have, you can see in a line, and you start with bare land or monocrop, let's say.

SPEAKER_00 29:02

It's pretty much the same,

SPEAKER_01 29:04

yeah. Yeah, it's exactly the same. It's a green desert or whatever objective you have to give to that, but yeah, you understand the point. And on the other side, you have a forest, a real forest. I mean, it doesn't have to be a tropical forest, but the maximum of this environment that this environment can provide by that time. So you have a complex forest. But in the middle, you can have a sort of kind of production that doesn't have to be the big complex agroforestry, but can have three, four species or occupy the system properly, three-dimensionally. And it will have a lot of benefits that you can even imagine. We are just grasping of the benefits that this kind of complex system can give to us. And I would even pose, as you said, that agroforestry has been there since the very beginning of agriculture. If you talk about like 13,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, like it was there. The very first agriculture we did, we did on the boundaries of forests or in the clearings of forest so it was agroforest in some way we just lost that and a few years ago a few hundreds of years ago and you just simplified too much to have this maze or nothing or beans or maze and what you are trying to do now is recover some of this knowledge but using technology in our favor and even if you think about photosynthesis we can And there's a lot of people talking today about improving photosynthesis through more carbon dioxide and the right amount of sun or adding fertilizers or organic fertilizers or biofertilizers. But you can do that, just changing the shape of our plantation using stratification. So you can have a wave of... You can... make our surface different. Instead of having a plain surface on the canopy, you can have like a

SPEAKER_00 31:18

waved surface. I have to explain that, because obviously Walter is doing a wave on the video, but nobody can see that. So basically, if you imagine a flat plain land somewhere, and if you just plant corn or one crop, they're all going to be more or less the same height, which means they all capture sunlight at more or less the same time, they probably shut off at more or less the same time, they get overcooked, etc. But if you integrate Are there species that have different heights? You basically create a wave on the landscape, which is different for wind, which is very different for sun. And basically, as any farmer is a solar entrepreneur that tries to get as many sunlights as they could possibly get and turn them into sugars or something useful, you want to have as many solar panels out there, which means as many leaves, as many surfaces that can do photosynthesis. So as soon as you go into a wave, you basically intensify your possibility of capturing sunlight and doing photosynthesis instead of having this flat surface where for kilometers and kilometers and kilometers, you don't see anything else than a line. You try to create different areas to capture sunlight.

SPEAKER_01 32:17

Yeah, Cisco explained it way better than me. You don't have to pay anything else. That's just perfect.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

That's my job, asking questions.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

You just said that you can go for 1.6, like 60% more surface area for photosynthesis. So that's the way you could harvest 60% more. So it's a lot of improvements.

SPEAKER_00 32:38

Which is a nice bridge to My next question, I think you might get a lot of attention as well, but I definitely get a lot of people that are very excited about this as well. And investors that want to invest, they are convinced about agroforestry. They've read some books. They've maybe visited some farms, hopefully. They've seen some videos. What would be some tips from your side as you have seen so many agroforestry systems that worked and so many that didn't? What would be one or two key questions that investors should ask or things they should look out for when they are getting active in the agroforestry world, which is super exciting, but obviously full of noise and full of things that we don't know yet are not going to work.

SPEAKER_03 33:12

Okay. So I would say that the investor should look for the planning. Understand what does that agroforestry is looking for to be. I mean, why the person planted that agroforestry and what is it supposed to produce, you know? So are you planning to harvest first short-term crop or are you going to plant? to harvest coffee, how is your planning? How does it look like? And so you will understand when is it going to pay itself at least, or when is it the break-even point? So you can understand a little bit when are the revenues, the incomes inside the system.

SPEAKER_01 33:58

Go for the management. Go for the management. For all the investors, go for the management. Try to see, okay, are you going to do this kind of complexity? Are you going to plant in this way? Okay, okay. I understand all the benefits of agroforestry for environmental services, carbon in the soil, blah, blah, blah. But now tell me, how are you going to manage that? What you are expecting? What is the machinery? What is the people that is going to be working on that? How many people are coming? Is it going to work? You have seen that before. If not, of course, no problem. We haven't seen so much large-scale agroforestry in the world. But let's say, is that well planned how you're going to manage? Because it's

SPEAKER_03 34:42

not that complex, actually. The problem is that, for instance, in Brazil, we have many opportunities for public financing, for financing the agroforestry systems, either for smallholder farmers, but for big farms as well. But the banks won't give the financing if there's not a proper planning. You have to know when are you going to harvest? How much do you plan to harvest? So you have to have this planning. So it's the same logic as to finance, something like that. And I would say that it's not that complex because we planned a project, a coffee design. We planned and implemented a coffee designed for Minas Gerais, for a region where they produce this very special coffee, super high quality coffee. And they were looking for not only organic, but a complex and agroforestry system but not that complex that they wouldn't be able to manage so we planned wasn't a super complex design actually we had together with coffee we had the macadamia nut macadamia nut the cedar so we had coffee a nut and a timber tree and a few species for service species that we call it to bring diversity and to Nitrogen, biomass. Nitrogen and biomass for the system. So we just diversify the production. We have coffee and macadamia nut. And when we did the economical modeling, we understood that the macadamia could provide the same amount of revenue as the coffee did. Yeah,

SPEAKER_00 36:28

that's a good question. What do you see in terms of, I mean, obviously the ecosystem returns and obviously the non-financial returns, but can you explain that a bit more, like the financial returns for potential investors? or companies what do you see there like do you see these huge changes because that's the same as coffee which is which was and is the cash crop it's that's enormous that changes everything for the farmer if because of the implementing and the maintenance etc obviously aren't as high as well so what changed there if you had to look at that example in terms of broad changes in terms of costs and revenues

SPEAKER_01 37:01

yeah again we are talking about diversification so if you diversify the main thing you have to see your you have to see your soil, your land, as your biggest asset. Especially if you're talking about a climate change world or global warming scenario. So you have to think that you have to save our main asset, that's our soil. And in that way, the system is key. Again, the design, we have this microclimate creation besides all the nitrogen and biomass and everything and carbon in the soil. So if you look into that, you're going to divert diversify your species. Since you diversified species, crops in the area, you consequently diversify your income. And you're going to be more resilient for the market. So once you see that, another key factor for the investors to ask is how is it planned when you give a ROI, a VPN, NPV? How did the guys came to those numbers? What we do generally is do that modularly per species. So every time you have to change a species in our models, the whole model you change, but you understand perfectly how much this species, not perfectly, of course, but you can have a prognosis of how much one tree will produce and how much this tree is going to produce if it's under shades, how much it produces if it's planted with other species. So you can infer by experience here, by literature, by local knowledge, we can infer partially how it's going to change. And from this, this very basic table of knowledge and numbers, you can do different modelings, you can do different economical modelings, and end up seeing our coasts as the main tool of decision making that you can have. So you can go and say, okay, so this tree is giving me a good revenue, but it's costing a lot to manage. Instead, this other one is not costing that much and the revenue is similar. So we can adapt our system to a proper and profitable system.

SPEAKER_03 39:29

Yeah, I would say that you just have to compare it with the monoculture. So, for instance, this one of the example of coffee. If we we compare it with a monoculture crop, plantation of coffee. We have 5,000 plants of coffee in the monocrop, and we have 3,000 in the other design, in the agroforestry design. We have 3,000 coffee plants plus 500 macadamia nut. Of course, that in the same area, we will produce a little bit less coffee, of course, because there are less coffee plants but we will have a second product of this of this design so we just have to know in how many in one hectare or in one module how many plants of each species of or of each crop are there and how much your prognosis says that it's going to produce of course we used the information of the monocrop information so we know that this variety of coffee produces five kilos of coffee per year but since it's a little bit under shade and now we'll say we'll be conservative and say it produces four kilos per year and the same thing as the for plant per plant and the same thing about the macadamia it produces for instance 20 kilos of of nuts per year and so if we know for one plant we know for the whole system

SPEAKER_01 41:02

and you can change you can adapt and one thing that paulo said that is extremely important is that that people use to say or get confused thinking that agroforestry produces more it doesn't agroforestry will not produce more it will produce more per area but not per plant so if you have a cacao production and say that in agroforestry you're going to produce more that's a lie that's not true definitely that's not true but definitely you can have

SPEAKER_00 41:31

more calories

SPEAKER_01 41:33

going there together at the same time so you're going to have much more production and resilience So what you look for and what you aim with agroforestry is optimization rather than maximization. Maximizing a system is not right. We did that with green revolution. Didn't go as well, didn't went well, and we didn't solve the problems we believed we would. But if we optimize our system to be resilient and you have more yields per area, but not per species, So you have to consider this trade-off is extremely important.

SPEAKER_00 42:13

And you need to find the customers for the different species, obviously, because there are only so many macadamia nuts you can eat yourself. So it needs to be a certain level of scale, which fits in the context that there are in your area buyers for a right price for the extra crop. And I think often there, that's lacking. Like you need almost to buy your full rotation if you were an annual crop farmer. But if you're a perennial farmer, you need to find different people or someone that buys all your sellable produce, not your service trees, but the other ones. And then you need a bit of scales in some cases, obviously, to do that. I was going to ask you, how do you monitor your projects when you're not there or when you're, how do you make sure to keep track? I think, which is a question for investors as well. What do you monitor in terms of data, both on the ground, in the ground, in the trees? What are your key monitor aspects you look at?

SPEAKER_01 43:02

Well, there are different tools and different approaches and every project is different. So you don't have one end answer to that, but we are forest engineers, so we work a lot with statistics, and so you do experiments all the time. What we have done, and I think that comes handy to use as an example, what we did in Amazon, we create an index called the API, the Forestry Performance Index, that you use very visual features to classify how the system is going. So instead of a measure, a complicated things. So imagine a forest-dependent person living in the Amazon being a smallholder farmer without even access to a city or to a lab. So you cannot test leaves or content or even a simple soil analysis. So what we do is, rather than this, we count the number of species, the amount of biomass in the soil by size, by how thick it or biodiversity, what kind of birds we're seeing that lands or yields in a very simple way. So comparing this, using metrics of comparing this to literature, the things that have been proved. So you know pretty much that if a soil has that much of covering, it's pretty much like the carbon content will be between this and that. So doing correlation and using new technology. Let's say new technology is WhatsApp. So trying to have these people engaged. Which is great because you can take pictures. Yeah, I mean. Yeah, exactly. Things are there already. You have all the technology you need. You just have to be smart, smart, fast, doing quickly and have these people engaged. So they can show what they are doing and you can see remotely a lot. And even now and then or when the project can pay for that, when we are close enough, things change. We can have labs, so you can collect soil leaves and do the normal and follow the procedure for chemical analysis.

SPEAKER_03 45:18

Pretty much what we need to understand in monitoring is just the productivity, like how much the trees are growing, how much they are producing, and the costs involved. So how long are you taking to manage your production system? What are the inputs that you're putting in it? And it's pretty much eat. So there are a few indicators that will tell us about the environmental quality, which is what Walter said, the biodiversity, the number of species, pretty much it, and the soil covering. And that's a very simple and easy way to monitor, and you can do it in a remote way via WhatsApp with the farmers.

SPEAKER_00 46:00

Super interesting. I want to ask you an experimental question that I haven't asked a lot on the podcast. If you look in agroforestry, you've already mentioned it a few things that were missing or are missing, but to really make this scale and grow and be replicable. I mean, you're working on a lot, but if you had to focus on only one thing, and I'm using the ITN framework for that, which is importance, tractability and neglectiveness. So is there something in agroforestry that's very important? Like it would be absolutely crucial if that could be fixed, it would be amazing for the world. It's very solvable. Like we know how to do it. We don't have to invent anything new. It's not nuclear fusion or anything. And it's neglected. Like there are very few people working on it. What would be the thing in agroforestry that would be super important, super solvable and doable, and also traceable and monitorable? And what is the thing that most people are not working on? Design. I would say design. Design. The system. Come back to design.

SPEAKER_01 46:55

That's key. That's key.

SPEAKER_03 46:57

Because the fact is, we have all this huge amount of knowledge spread around the world about monocrops, about each crop, about each species. And it's everywhere, you know? So if you plant... Yeah, so you don't have access to it. So what we need is to put all this knowledge together and to use this, apply it to a systematized production system. This is something that we've been working a long time now and it's probably going to take even longer to finish because it's very complex. It's like something like a tool, like a software where we can build this huge database about species. So we have a huge list of species and crops and all the parameters about them, what are their succession, what are their strata, how do you manage them, which region are they going to produce, how much do they produce, which time of the year do they produce, all the information about them. Carbon,

SPEAKER_01 48:00

all the carbon

SPEAKER_03 48:01

information

SPEAKER_01 48:02

together, all the yields, the trade-offs.

SPEAKER_03 48:05

The crown architecture, all the information about those species and crops and with this in hand you'll be able to plan a much proper and and viable design you know but you have

SPEAKER_01 48:19

to have this knowledge and enough adherence

SPEAKER_00 48:22

and uh with uh empowerment how does indigenous knowledge fit into that like traditional knowledge which you mentioned some of it is lost some of it is there some of it we probably half remember but don't really like what's the because there's so much knowledge uncovered as well and other languages, not even written. How do you get that into a system?

SPEAKER_01 48:42

You systematize. So local knowledge is a whole process. That's a very important key of the process. It's an anthropological approach, definitely. And you translate that into math or into numbers. eCraft has a tool called the AKT. AKT is a pretty good tool, quite old now, but you can start from that. But basically you talk to people, you understand and you take things that makes sense. You leave things that doesn't make that much sense aside for a while and you just systematize it. You just say, okay, so it makes sense with that. So it goes in a column and you start to make sense

SPEAKER_00 49:21

out of this all. And how often are you wrong in the sense that you put it in a column and actually it should have been in another one? Or the thing that wasn't important you thought actually turned out to be quite

SPEAKER_03 49:31

important? Because actually we are very conservative, I would say. Because, for instance, when we put a production, Yield for species, for instance. We always put it in the database per plant, of course. So we always put a little bit less. It's very important. Everything should be conservative. And probably you'll be wrong in the end because you plant less and probably you'll be...

SPEAKER_00 49:56

Under-promise and over-deliver.

SPEAKER_03 49:58

Yeah, maybe over-deliver will be the problem. But I think you have to be conservative.

SPEAKER_01 50:04

But everything will be there with your weight. So you change weights. So let's... Let's say that one specific tree will flower and will bloom in Brazil. And just after 40 days after the blooming, you plant the maize as a typical example. So it will be there with other scientifically improved information. And it will have like a weight of 0.2, let's say. And you're going to wait until that makes more sense, the scientific one, and you're going to adjust the weight. Yeah, but it's not like

SPEAKER_03 50:36

you'll be wrong or the time or you'll be right all the time you just have to have like a framework you know the way you you go you know the path but you have to build it along the way of course because you're talking about agriculture you're talking about management a biological system so it's much more complex than just planning it and it will vary a lot according to how much it will rain all the weather of each year and if you have any problem with some pests or some diseases you'll have to adapt of course but you have like um like a framework you know where to start where you're aiming where to finish you know so it's not that much complicated what our dream i would say like our dream and our also our goal is to build this tool and to make it available for people somehow that uh it will become like a platform where you plan your design based on this big database And you will monitor your system, like the productivity, the growth of the trees, the timber, everything. And then you'll feed the database as well. So if we have a productivity for one specific tree in Sao Paulo state in Brazil, and the same tree will produce a little bit different in Sumatra Island in Indonesia. So in that design, they will feed the... the database like a huge platform that would be like like a dream like but maybe yeah we're working on that we're working

SPEAKER_00 52:17

on that which answers one of my questions if you had a magic wand what would you change overnight if you could do anything i think i can answer the question for you you would make sure that system would be there tomorrow tonight basically

SPEAKER_01 52:30

yeah i i would add one thing with this magic wendy i i i would like to make it disappear all the fakers in the world. Let's say all the people that are saying that doing something it is not doing and is actually jeopardizing the real work on agroforestry and like making the, is blowing the process of adoption because you do believe that agroforestry can solve pretty much all the problems in the world. So you just need serious people.

SPEAKER_00 52:58

And it's a nice bridge actually. We've talked about the financial side and investors. If you would be in charge of a$1 billion investment fund tomorrow morning, not with a magic wand, like you had to do the work, you cannot I'll just outsource it. How would you invest that? And I'm asking this question because I think there's going to be a lot of influx of capital and we as a sector need to be ready. So I understand it's a lot of money and you don't have to go to the dollar. Like I want to put 200 million there, et cetera. But what would be the main pieces you would invest in to really, let's say, move agroforestry forward, but also obviously with an investor hat on? Well,

SPEAKER_03 53:34

actually, it's a lot of money. And with this huge amount of money made Maybe we could take like 5% of it to develop the software, but all the rest should go on the ground. To the ground. To plant trees, should go to the forest dependent people, should go to finance collecting seeds, building nurseries, buying tractors and everything. Cut

SPEAKER_01 54:00

all the administration fees that people are using. Cut them all and go straight to the ground. and make agroforestry and just 5% for the software because it's enough

SPEAKER_03 54:14

you know it's not that much complicated but to put agroforestry in the ground with 1 billion how much you said 1 billion

SPEAKER_00 54:21

1 billion 9 zeros

SPEAKER_03 54:23

no I would say you can do a lot with that a lot how much how many hectares you would say we

SPEAKER_01 54:29

can plant I'm just thinking about the great green wall but that's the subject for next

SPEAKER_00 54:35

podcast for another episode I mean, 5% on the software to monitor, to make it accessible for anybody that's not touched by the other 95 that you invest in the land and in the trees and in the soil. I think it's a very good answer. And a question I asked, and I actually interviewed him yesterday, John Kempf, he always asked in his podcast about conventional and extractive agriculture. What do you believe to be true that others don't? And I like to ask it in terms of regenerative agriculture. We can ask it in agroforestry as well. Like, what do you two believe to be true? that others don't believe to be true in agroforestry or regenerative agriculture, whatever you prefer?

SPEAKER_01 55:14

Trees. We have to have trees. I think like many people believe that you can add this like biofertilizers and make the plant healthy and so the soil will be healthy enough. Otherwise, you can just rebuild your soil to make plants healthy. There's one thing, one machine called the tree that can do all the job and trees are we have to believe you have to understand that trees are social beings they were here way before we mammals not even human beings but mammals were here so plants have been here on earth for a long while and they don't move so well they move a little bit but they since they are stuck to the place they were born or they grow they germinate they have to cope with all the solutions being there. So they are extremely adapted and so they have to cooperate between each other. So when you have a complex system, so what we believe is that you cannot do regenerative agriculture if you don't add trees to the system. You

SPEAKER_03 56:26

have to have trees and you have to have biodiversity because each species has its own role in the system. So each tree or each crop will cycle a different nutrient will relate to a different microorganism in soil so we'll be able to capture the sun in a different moment of the day so you have to have this diversity and the trees they are the most important component of the landscape actually because they are the ones who bring all the ecosystem services that we are looking for they fix the carbon they uh regulate the microclimate. They protect the soil.

SPEAKER_00 57:10

They bring the rain.

SPEAKER_03 57:12

Exactly. They suck the water to the soil. They cycle the nutrients very, very deep in the soil and bring it to the surface. So it's for free. Just put them on the ground. Just put the trees on the ground. And that's pretty much what we are looking for.

SPEAKER_01 57:27

Putting trees in the ground. You have to be humble because when you talk about nitrogen or carbon, carbon fixation or photosynthesis. Even though that's the main thing, plants do photosynthesis. They interchange solar, as you said, like they harvest the sun and use carbon dioxide. But it is still a short-sight way of seeing because we don't know. We have to be humble. We just have to let nature do its job. So it's more complex than we believe you have actually understood so far. So put trees in the system,

SPEAKER_00 58:04

they will work a lot. And to end with a final question, I always say that, but it's usually not true. But to end with a final question, I know you're working on a, and actually Filipe, who I interviewed before of ReNature, was already mentioning it a bit on a big degraded land project in Brazil with cattle and silvopasture. Can you explain a bit that, so to make it concrete as we're ending this podcast, what that project is about, what you're doing there? It's large scale. Fernando introduced us, also mentioned it. What are you doing on the ground there? And obviously there are trees

SPEAKER_03 58:35

involved. Yeah, there will be. So this project is supposed to be a model for the whole region because in southern in western Brazil the most important activity is cattle ranching and they are free actually they are extensive production but if it's not made properly eventually you will degrade your pasture of course and it's related to deforestation not because not only because it's occupying the land where it used to be a forest, but also because there is no trees in the pasture land. So you have this huge area of pasture land without trees. So the idea, the focus on this project is to develop a production system that could merge the cattle ranching, the cattle production, with trees in the landscape. And diversifying the youth, not only the money coming from the cattle, but also from the trees.

SPEAKER_01 59:41

Yeah, respecting the animal production, I mean the animal welfare, while rebuilding the system. So, adding trees. It's an audacious project. We want to create the best cattle ranching agroforestry system in the world. So, that's what we're talking about. It's

SPEAKER_00 1:00:03

an amazing and audacious project. How big is it? What are we talking about? It's just to paint the picture. From what I understand, it's very degraded land. So what are you planning to introduce just to make it visual for the podcast listeners? Like what should we imagine that it's now and what should it be in five or 10 years?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:21

Well, we still don't know species or the design properly at the very beginning of the project. So you're surveying now.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:29

That's actually our part is to plan the design and to implement it on the ground. So we are talking about one farm with 1,200 hectares and this is the it's going to be the model farm potentially it can grow to 23,000 hectares but the idea is that other farmers in the region will get inspired from it will understand it and try to do it by themselves as well

SPEAKER_00 1:00:57

and it's going to involve obviously different tree species and different management of the cattle I can imagine to not have it over grazed like they're doing now

SPEAKER_03 1:01:05

yes

SPEAKER_00 1:01:06

absolutely it's going to be

SPEAKER_03 1:01:08

a lot of work we are very excited about it but definitely we'll add a lot of timber trees we'll add some nut species to produce nuts and we'll have to plan the grazing very well it's going to be a big challenge

SPEAKER_01 1:01:23

and it's extremely multidisciplinary so there will be we'll be working with several schools of possibilities it's ambitious it's a big project

SPEAKER_00 1:01:36

we'll see the next month I'm looking forward to checking in in another podcast to see how the design, but especially the implementation, obviously, is coming along. I want to thank you so much, Paula and Walter, for your time today and your enthusiasm and sharing the progress in agroforestry, the challenges, the opportunities, what's missing, what's going well, and basically getting us up to speed.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:58

Great. We appreciate the opportunity as well. For us, it's a pleasure to share our vision, our work, and we really believe in agroforestry We are so sure that if we plant trees and we systematize and we plan the system, we can improve so much all the landscapes, all the production systems. And that's our mission. That's what we are working for.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:22

Yeah. Thank you, Koen. It was a pleasure. Plenty of trees. Add the trees to your land. And don't believe in only one answer. Believe in the trees.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:33

I saw a great quote of, I think it's the Savory Highlander. top person in the Nordics or in Norway or in one of the Nordic countries has said underperforming landscapes and underperforming ecosystems. And I think we cannot even imagine what we could actually produce both on perennial lands and annual and especially when we start mixing the two. So thank you so much for opening a lot of doors and opening a lot of images that we couldn't imagine before. You're

SPEAKER_03 1:02:59

welcome. It's a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:00

Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:01

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:03

If you found the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast valuable, there are Thank you. Thank you so much and see you at the next podcast.