A movement in Brazil is reimagining agriculture to save the industry—and the rain forest
BY CIARA NUGENT/ TIMBURI, BRAZIL
IN A FIELD OF BARE RED DIRT IN SÃO Paulo state, Paula Costa is trying to turn back the clock. Five hundred years ago, this land was part of the Mata Atlantica, a dense, diverse rain forest that covered 15% of Brazil. Its trees stretched more than 2,000 miles along the eastern Atlantic coast, and far inland. But today 93% of the forest has been stripped of trees, with much of it turned over to monoculture farming. Costa, a 36-year-old biologist, bangs the ground with her fist: it’s hard, the dry soil degraded by the tropical sun.
Yet on this sweltering morning in March 2022, a few green shoots have forced their way through the surface. The rain forest is making a comeback. “These will be jack beans. These are millet. These are radishes,” she says, fingering them lovingly. “They’re going to bring the soil back to life.”
This is not just a reforestation project. It’s also a farm. Soon, those green pioneers will be joined by shrubby coffee plants, big-leaved banana trees, and native trees, like sturdy hardwood jatobas, or towering guanandis. As they grow, some plants will pull underground nutrients to the topsoil with their roots, while others provide shade and draw moisture down from the atmosphere. Most of them will produce crops to sell. “Everything has its function,” Costa says. She and her partner Valter Ziantoni, a 41-year-old forest engineer, are experts in agroforestry— a method of growing food and other things humans need by mimicking natural ecosystems. In 2021, the couple began planting agroforestry systems on parcels of degraded agricultural land around the town of Timburi. By 2025, they aim to plant a flag for a new way of farming over 2,500 acres of the former Mata Atlantica.
Agroforestry closely resembles the way Indigenous peoples managed the lands that became Brazil for millennia. That was before the 20th century, when leaders of European descent began calling on citizens to “subdue the forest” and replace diverse landscapes with single crops for immediate profit. That attitude became even more entrenched under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. From 2019 to 2022, he stopped enforcing policies meant to protect the rain forest and Indigenous communities, resulting in a 60% surge in annual deforestation rates.
The irony is that the tree-clearing strategy has thrown Brazilian agriculture into a self-inflicted crisis. The country’s rain forests are t
