Last year in September, our largest farm operation in Brazil was hit by a devastating fire. The same fire burned down a region the size of Italy between the Cerrado biome and the Amazon. Our 13,000-hectare operation of cattle, grains, and agroforestry is located in the municipality of Pontes e Lacerda, close to the border with Bolivia. The fire came from one of our neighbors and quickly spread to our pasture lands and forest reserve areas. Thanks to the wind blowing in the right direction, our housing facilities and main infrastructure were not hit, and we did not have any injuries among staff or animals. However, waking up in Amsterdam to videos of the fire raging through the land we were carefully working to regenerate was heartbreaking. Unlike when disastrous fires hit mansions in California, when fires affect precious forests in Brazil, there are no firefighting planes to combat the flames.
Our staff was left to do what they could with our own neighborhood brigade of men and farm equipment. Bear in mind that we are talking about thousands of hectares, so neighbors are far apart with limited road access, and by the time the fire hit, they were also engulfed in flames. With a feeling of complete impotence, all I could do was watch years of work go up in flames in hours. The severe drought hitting hard our farm cash flows, was going to deliver us another blow. The fire raged for a few days until we could regroup the animals and assess the damage. It all happened in the first week of September, and the damage accounted for kilometers of fence infrastructure and hectares of pasture land, but we knew little about the extent of the damage in the native forest areas. The first reports that came through mentioned that the first forest restorations were likely lost. Our R&D farm of 1,200 hectares, a few kilometers away, was spared from the fire, so hope for a new beginning was the only comfort I could hold on to. We continued to soldier on with the help of the dedicated farm staff who found alternatives to keep all the animals on the farm as healthy as possible. We also made the tough decision to proceed with the restorations that were planned for the start of the rainy season, planting another 28 hectares of forests in December.
Less than five months later, I was back on the farm with all my business partners for our onsite board meeting. I had asked the team to take us on a tour of the devastated areas so we could have a more vivid picture of how they were responding with the start of the rainy season, which this year came on strong, pouring much-needed torrential rain into the Brazilian Cerrado. What I saw was the most impressive lesson about the power of nature and the resilience of the Cerrado biome that I had ever experienced. The farm was lush green, with most of the forest growing back to its abundant state and the grasslands thriving again. One had to look deep between the canopy to still see the damage done by the fire, but nature was showing all the signs that it was in full regeneration mode. Most impressive were the areas we had planted at the beginning of the project. The team had considered those plots a failed attempt at planting native species of trees. Back in those days, when we made the first attempts at restoration, the team was still not equipped with the knowledge and skills to conduct effective restorations. There was also no proper maintenance of the area, and the fire was seen as the nail in the coffin, but what happened was the opposite. The area came back even more resilient. Young trees survived the fire, and dormant seeds started sprouting with the heavy rains. The area is almost looking like a native forest again.
The new areas that the team planted in December are also thriving, and the more they plant, the better and more efficient they become at restoring large areas using a combination of the indigenous technique of “muvuca”—a bomb of native seeds planted directly in the ground with compost—combined with seeds of species we use as cover crops to provide initial soil protection and seedlings of native species that are more sensitive to soil conditions and climate. Besides getting better at restoration, the team also discovered new indirect benefits of working in partnership with nature. Wildlife predation of soybeans by wild boars or the mixed breed called “Java Porco” (a mix between wild boar and domestic pigs) is one of the major issues faced by soybean growers. What we learned in practice on our fields is that the newly restored areas planted next to the existing nature reserves provided a buffer feeding zone for the wild animals, who enjoyed the variety of wild beans present in our cover crop mix much more than the boring soybeans we export to Europe to pay our bills. The wild pigs also help fertilize the new areas and spread more seeds.
The beauty of regenerative agriculture is that once you stop fighting nature with a bunch of expensive chemicals and start working in partnership with the local ecology, an almost magical flow emerges, bringing the pieces together in a positive vortex that can yield unexpected benefits. We must also take into consideration that the Cerrado biome is built to be resilient to fire, unlike the Amazon biome, unfortunately. However, nature is demonstrating incredible power and resilience at this moment of climate crisis, giving us the hope we need to get to work and do what we can to support this regeneration.
