UAUÁ, Bahia, Brazil — Everything is growing in Perpétua’s grove now. “Can you see? This is avocado; over there, papaya. This year I already got acerola. We plant a little bit of everything here. Carrots, beets. Here, I planted coriander. This is a pigeon pea; we make a very tasty farofa with it. This row is for passion fruit; we also plant corn on it. Here in the middle, when it rains, I plant cassava. But not much lettuce — we feed on it first, and if there’s any left, we take it to the market. First us, right?” The proudest producer in the Serra da Besta community, in northeastern Brazil, points out each plant, fruit and tree as if they were trophies. Not on a shelf but outdoors, all planted in the ground, side by side, like in a forest, but one you can eat. Where once lay barren land that caused anything planted on it to wither now grows a prosperous and diverse farm in a space measuring just 30 by 40 meters (100 by 130 feet). So rare in these rain-deprived backlands that it earned a sign at the entrance: “Agrocaatinga,” it says. In other words, an agroforest adapted to the Caatinga, the Brazilian dry forest biome. “We thought about agroecological solutions that included techniques that allowed coexisting with the semiarid climate,” explains agronomist Egidio Trindade, general coordinator of the Agrocaatinga project, implemented by a local cooperative, Coopercuc (the Family Agricultural Cooperative of Canudos, Uauá and Curaçá).…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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