RECA’s farmers approximate that ecosystem, densely planting up to 40 species in their recreated rainforest parcels. The natural rainforest preserves biodiversity, protects soil and water, and sequesters carbon in its trees, mitigating climate change. RECA, a co-op founded in 1989, demonstrates how it could be done. But because agroforestry systems require far less land than cattle to make a living, they could take the pressure off the rainforest that remains-if they were more widely implemented. So far, nearly a fifth of the Amazon has been cleared. Once depleted, yields of beef per acre diminish, so the ranchers move on, converting more forest to pastures until those soils are shot, too. Ranchers get caught in a vicious cycle, felling forest and establishing pastures that quickly deplete the nutrients in the thin tropical soils. For decades, cattle ranching has been the dominant economic activity in the Amazon, driving 80 percent of forest loss. These forests exist because Furtunato’s employer, a local agroforestry cooperative called RECA, has made it economically viable to plant and tend them, an especially important endeavor at a time when the rainforest is being razed at an alarming rate.
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