Photo Credit: Xu Weijie / VCG via Getty Images
When Brazilian farmer Ricardo Santinoni first planted soybeans in the central state of Goias, he could only afford to sow about 70 hectares. Two decades on, he has 1 000. And he did it without cutting down a single tree.
The land Santinoni took over from his father was a degraded cattle-grazing pasture - once part of Brazil's vast Cerrado tropical savanna - cleared decades ago and then abandoned when it became unproductive.
But over the years, Santinoni and his partner Fernanda Ferreira, an agronomist, have gradually brought it back to a fertile condition by rotating other crops such as corn or beans and grazing cattle on it to enrich the soil with manure.
"I see myself as a small part of a giant whole," Santinoni told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in his office at the Morro do Peao farm, gesturing to a red plaque hanging on the wall that sums up their mission: "Feed Life in a Sustainable Way."
Soy farming, closely linked to deforestation, has seldom been synonymous with sustainability, but Santinoni said more and more farmers were working to regenerate depleted land instead of expanding the agricultural frontier.
