Trees are replacing cows in the Amazon. Can save the rainforest
Maracaçume, Brazil: Residents of Maracaçumé, an impoverished city on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, are baffled by the company that recently purchased the region’s largest livestock farm. How can you make money planting trees, which executives say they will never cut down, on pastures where cows have been grazing for decades?
“We are ending the pastures that many farmers need,” said Josias Araújo, a former cowboy who now works in reforestation, as he stood on a patch of land he was helping to fertilize. “It’s all strange.”
Some livestock on a farm in Maracaçumé, Brazil, have to make room for the trees to return.Credit: Victor Moriyama/The New York Times
The new company, which is also Araújo’s new employer, is a forest restoration company called Re.green. His goal, along with a handful of other companies, is to create an entirely new industry that can make standing trees, which store planet-warming carbon, more lucrative than the world’s biggest driver of deforestation: livestock farming. .
It is the holy grail of forestry economics. And now it could be within our reach.
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