To Save the Rainforest, Think Like the Rainforest

The wisdom of how the forest regenerates its resources may save the forest, uplift smallholder farmers, and help fix the climate crisis.

This article is adapted from Bright Green Future, a book of stories from a global renaissance to heal the planet by empowering communities.

Several decades ago, Reginaldo “Regi” Haslett-Marroquín was on his way to agriculture school. The bus rumbled through the Guatemalan countryside, passing by a Civil War that was hiding in the jungle. With help from his brother-in-law, he pulled together all the supplies he needed for school, including a new pair of boots donated from a friend in the army. He was riding into a new chapter of life.

Haslett-Marroquín grew up on a farm on the edge of the rainforest, where he saw how nature provided for countless species without lifting a finger. Photo of Tikal National Park in Guatemala by Jason Houston for USAID.

For Regi, it had been a long journey to this point — one that began with a childhood dream. His family made their living by farming a small plot of corn and beans outside of town. From an early age, he worked the fields with his father and brothers. If the crops failed one season, he went to bed without anything to eat. For weeks, he would have to get by on nothing but lard and tortillas. But on the edge of the farm, he marveled at the surrounding rainforest. He saw how nature provided for countless species without lifting a finger. It became his dream to use this wisdom to grow food for those who go hungry.

He was only a few miles away from school when the bus came to a stop. They’d reached a checkpoint where the army searched for rebels among the civilians. A soldier came aboard and shouted, “Everyone off!” While the passengers lined up with their hands against the side of the bus, the soldiers went through each bag.

“Whose bag is this?” one of them asked.

Regi saw that it was his and, without thinking, raised his hand. As he tried to explain why he was carrying combat boots, one of the soldiers shoved him to the ground. They kicked him, accusing him of being a deserter or worse, a guerilla. Regi repeated the same story. “I have a telegram from the school. It is a government school. I am not a rebel.”

At last, one of the soldiers ordered them to stop. “Maybe you’re telling the truth. We’re going to turn around and count to ten. When we turn back, we better not see you.”

He ran as fast as he could. He was aiming for a cornfield that seemed just out of reach. Each number felt like a second closer to his death. He kept running, hoping to put as much distance as he could between him and the soldiers. He heard them count ten. He dove to the ground. Gunfire erupted. Bullets passed over his head. He scrambled into the cornfield, searching for cover among the stalks. As he ran, he could make out the sound of the bus driving away.

That night, a farmer took him in, cleaned his wounds, and gave him a place to sleep. He awoke to find a few tortillas and enough money for a bus ticket to his school. Regi could have died that day on the road. He could have joined the hundreds of thousands of civilians who just disappeared. But he survived, and with him, so did his dream. He’d dedicate the rest of his life to turning conventional farming on its head.

Regi’s vision to access the wisdom of the rainforest stars an unlikely hero. It begins with a chicken. We might think of chickens as birds meant to roam free on an open range. But as Regi pointed out, “The chicken is a jungle bird.” They evolved in the rainforests of Southeast Asia, pecking for grubs under the canopy. When Regi designs a food system, he starts with chickens under a canopy of hazelnuts and elderberries. He calls this “tree-range,” not “free-range.”

The chicken may be a “jungle bird,” but that doesn’t mean it has to live in the rainforest to be in its natural habitat. Today, Regi farms in a much different place from where he grew up. After graduating from agriculture school, he taught classes at an orphanage that was co-founded by his sister. It was there that he met Amy Haslett. She was a volunteer, teaching dance to the children. They fell in love, and when she moved back to the US, he joined her.

Today, their family farm sits on the prairie in Minnesota. In between rows of hazelnuts, Regi cultivates alleys of grain, vegetables, and other crops that chickens like to eat. As the fowl peck for insects and forage, they fertilize everything. Regi likes to think of their digestive system as a small part in the massive “digestive system of the Earth.” Just as the bacteria in our gut help break down our food into nutrients, animals break down nutrients for the entire planet.

He explained it like this. When we take crop residue or food scraps and throw them in a compost heap, they can take up to a year to fully decompose. If we feed that to a chicken or pig, the animal can break everything down into manure in two days. During the night, earthworms can break that down into a form that’s basically ready to fertilize a plant. “All of that happens within 48 to 72 hours. And it’s magnificent.”

With the chicken at the center, Regi is able to produce a wide range of healthy food without any chemical inputs.

But, “we don’t produce anything,” he declares. What he means is that we should look at a farm not as a production line, but as an energy system. “All nature does is organize that energy in the form of cows and grasses and chickens and carrots and all of the stuff we call food. But we don’t produce anything,” he says. Nature has many “time-tested ways of organizing things that, on one side, are inedible to us, and [puts] them through a process by which they become edible.”

In between rows of hazelnuts, Regi cultivates alleys of grain, vegetables, and other crops that chickens like to eat. As the fowl peck for insects and forage, they fertilize everything. Photo courtesy of Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquín.

“We are energy managers, not laborers,” Regi says of farmers and ranchers. Photo courtesy of Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquín.

If farmers and ranchers aren’t producing anything, then what are they doing? “We are energy managers, not laborers,” he says. “When we manage energy instead of production, then we get into this space where we win significantly: reduce labor, reduce cost, and reduce stress on the landscape.”

By looking at farming as managing the flow of energy, Regi quadrupled the output of hazelnuts inside his tree-range poultry paddocks compared to those outside. He did it using zero inputs, other than manure dropped by the chickens as they roamed. In one flock, he experimented with only having his birds feed on forage and sprouted grain, and in doing so, reduced external grain consumption by 67 percent. “If you could drop that price [of raising chickens] right now, without actually doing anything else, but improving our ecology, would you do it?”

In the energy system of a farm, Regi compares soil to a battery. The more it’s fed, the stronger it becomes. “At the end of the day, we are harvesting between 30 and 40 percent of all the energy that was captured,” he says. “That means 70 percent of that energy goes back into the system.” It’s the chicken manure, egg waste, crop residue, and leaf litter that charges the soil battery. Feeding the soil makes it so “your next cycle starts better off. And then the next cycle starts better off … There is no worse off. There are no diminishing returns.”

To capture the most energy, Regi thinks of an acre in three dimensions. “Instead of thinking of an acre as 43,560 square feet, we think of an acre as at least 1,111,200 cubic feet.” It includes tree trunks and branches that grow many feet up and roots that reach deep down. All that space is part of the same system working with the plants and animals on the ground.

Regi sees the knowledge of the rainforest as a blueprint to transform the food industry from the bottom up. Seventy-eight percent of the people working in agriculture in the US are immigrant laborers. As founder of the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, Regi is dedicated to building support systems and programming for beginning and transitioning farmers. He trains farm workers and aspiring farmers in his permaculture system. The organization provides an opportunity for those largely left out to become entrepreneurs, and to do so using nature’s advantage.

Regi put chickens at the center because of the low barrier to entry. They’re much easier to manage than larger animals like pigs, sheep, or cattle and only require a few acres and a coop to keep them safe. He designed the system to work on small plots. He estimated the annual gross income from chickens and nuts on a one-and-a-half acre plot can reach up to $41,000. For a three-acre plot that number is $148,000, depending on how the farmer manages and markets their yield.

“If you’re fighting nature, guess what? You lose every single time.” But if we tap into the intelligence of how nature uses energy to transform soil, sun, and water into food, “we can not only feed the world many times over, but we can fix the climate many times over and regenerate rural economies all over the world.”

As Regi works to uplift farmers in the US, Kofi Boa has started a revolution among smallholder farmers in Ghana. Though only two percent of Americans work in agriculture, farming is still the most common livelihood on Earth. Globally, an estimated two billion people manage plots of only a few acres. Kofi seeks to give these farmers the skills to heal the soil, preserve the forest, and grow their income.

His journey into agriculture began with a fire. One evening, at the age of 12, Kofi waited for his mother to return home. She was out tending to her cacao farm, the family’s only source of income. “Deep in the night, I heard my mother coming home, crying in the darkness of the village.” A nearby farmer had set fire to his field, a common technique to prepare it for planting. Unfortunately, the blaze whirled out of control as it swept across the brush and up the cacao trees.

This accident was the result of a practice known as “slash and burn,” or swidden, agriculture which for millennia has fertilized fields around the world. A patch of forest is cut and the vegetation is allowed to dry. It’s then burned, and the ash serves as fertilizer for future crops. If the forest has enough time to recover, then this practice can be done sustainably. But with many more people alive today than in the past, swidden agriculture can cause rapid deforestation. Sometimes, it burns down the neighbor’s farm. In 1983, one of those fires wiped out 90 percent of Ghana’s cacao farms.

After that night as a child, and in the hard years that followed, Kofi made a pledge. He turned to his mother and said, “I’m going to spend the rest of my life fighting the use of fire on the farmland.” He went searching for existing techniques that didn’t require farmers to burn the forest. “I spoke to elders in the village and learned that, rather than use fire, they used to cut vegetation, leave it on the ground for a year, and then come back to plant crops.” This technique, known as proka in the local Akan language, means “to let rot, in order to bring back.” Kofi adapted it to work in a quicker cycle, so that he didn’t have to wait an entire year for everything to fully decompose. He planted immediately among the cut vegetation, using it as mulch.

Kofi went on to pursue an education that took him from the top agricultural school in Ghana to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He learned how no-till farming works on some of the biggest and smallest farms in the world, spanning the extremes of high-tech and low-tech operations. He decided to put it all into practice back home in Ghana. Leading a government initiative, he and his team expanded conservation agriculture by more than 100 times. Participating farmers nearly doubled their family income, while cutting the time they spent working in the field by half. But despite its success, the government decided to prioritize other initiatives, and funding for the project dried up. The momentum came to an abrupt halt.

Kofi eventually ended up back in the village where he grew up. There, he started his own program, the Centre for No-till Agriculture. Today, he teaches regenerative agriculture in a way that matches the tools available to smallholder farmers. He shows how the machete can be used to clear the field, chop up vegetation, and make slits in the ground to plant seeds. Kofi’s organization focuses on in-person training. “We work on the premise that hearing is believing, but seeing is the truth.”

Their goal is to create a class of skilled advocates in communities across Ghana. “We’re able to build a group of local farmers and build them into champion farmers. And unlike government workers, unlike NGO staff that can easily be relocated, most of these people are natives to wherever we find them.”

Felicia Yeboah, one farmer who learned through Kofi’s program, was able to diversify her family’s income. She plants maize, beans, pepper, plantain, cocoyam, and cassava. “I can get lots of returns to care for my household,” she says. Meanwhile, because no-till doesn’t require as much labor, her kids don’t have to spend as much time in the field, which allows them to focus on their education. Two of her children graduated from high school. “I am paying for their education through my farm.”

The Centre for No-till Agriculture estimated that conservation agriculture increases the disposable income of farmers by an average of 25 percent in the first two years. Kofi hopes to spread this prosperity to the 500 million farmers across the world practicing swidden agriculture. “It is my dream that the whole of Africa will know how to sustain the productivity of a piece of land.”

The wisdom of how the forest regenerates its resources may save the forest, while uplifting smallholder farmers around the world. When put at odds, nature, food security, and income all suffer. When brought together, forest cycles enter farm rotations, rather than farms encroaching on forests. It’s a relationship of mutual prosperity, where food becomes abundant, local livelihoods improve, and the surrounding nature can begin to recover.

Get the Journal in your inbox.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

You Make Our Work Possible

You Make Our Work Possible

We don’t have a paywall because, as a nonprofit publication, our mission is to inform, educate and inspire action to protect our living world. Which is why we rely on readers like you for support. If you believe in the work we do, please consider making a tax-deductible year-end donation to our Green Journalism Fund.

Donate
Get the Journal in your inbox.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

The Latest

The Shocking Truth About Sloths

As their forests disappear, sloths are climbing on dangerous power lines. Veterinarians and rescue centers are developing new techniques to help.

Madeline Bodin

Australian Gas Project Threatens Aboriginal Heritage

Activists worry a Scarborough gas field project could destroy petroglyphs while hurting climate goals.

Campbell Young

Bats of the Midnight Sun

Active in daylight during the Arctic summer and hibernating during the long winter nights, Alaska’s little brown bats are a unique population. Can their niche lives help them avoid white-nose syndrome?

Words Trina Moyles Images Michael Code

Land and Love in Melbourne

An Australian referendum to provide a political voice for First Peoples may have failed, but the push will continue.

Alda Balthrop-Lewis

A Canadian Corporation is Poisoning My Argentinian Community

We, the people of Jáchal, are fighting for the right to safe and clean water.

Saúl Zeballos

Climate Comedy Works. Here’s Why.

We all need some refreshing levity nowadays – especially during this politically heavy year.

Maxwell Boykoff Beth Osnes