DIF Disruptive Innovation Festival
Leontino Balbo on the future of global food systems
Some people get intrigued about how I see the next step.
I do not see anything, the nature tells me what to do.
What am I? I am an observer.
I believe that the further you want to go,
the less you have to take with you.
That's what I do. I develop a technology, I profit from it and I go to the next one.
And we leave, to allow everybody else to profit from that.
My name is Leontino Balbo Jr,
I'm an agronomist and a executive at Balbo Group in Brazil.
Balbo Group is composed by three sugar mills:
two in Sao Paulo State and one in Minas Gerais State.
Lots of change were done
until we totally change the profile of our company and our business.
We switched 20,000 hectares of cane sugar plantation
from conventional production technology
into revitalizing agriculture.
This results from this new type of agriculture were so good
that we became the biggest supplier of organic sugar in the world.
We export to 64 countries, and now we also supply
neutral organic alcohol for the cosmetic industry.
My grandfather started working for the King of Coffee, Mr. Schmidt,
a hundred and ten years ago.
He had 12 children, which also worked for the German boss.
Since the beginning, they were used to face the soil and farm challenges,
which made all things easier for me.
When I arrived here I started working as an agronomist.
In the second week I couldn't accept the cane burning, all those things,
so I started to burn the cane, to cut it by hand,
to drop it in the soil, to dirty it and then to take it to the mill,
where we used to need four million liters of water per hour to wash that cane.
If we harvest that cane green, we wouldn't need that much water.
Something inside me said
that we should find a cleaner way of producing.
I proposed the Green Cane Project, aiming to improve the production way,
to take the cane to manifest its ecological potential.
We're going to to lower the environmental impact of the production,
while at the same time reducing the production's costs.
It worked so well
that this mill was the first one to harvest green cane in Brazil,
and then our example was followed
by 90% of the cane groves in Brazil.
Deep transformation is easier to happen
in a family business than in other kinds of big companies.
The next step after green cane harvests
was that I decided to eliminate the chemical fertilisers,
and then I decided to abolish the pesticides.
I didn't know how to do it and I was a little confused,
so I decided to go inside a forest to relax my mind.
I opened myself to the nature wisdom,
and suddenly I started seeing inside the forest, like an infographic.
I saw the birds, the insects and everything was interconnected.
There was a very sophisticated system of communication,
and I realized that all of those insects
were not attacking the plants of the forest
but the same insects used to attack the canes.
So, why?
I started observing what used to happen inside that forest,
and one by one, exemple by example I learned,
I started transferring them to agriculture.
There are lots of useful information in the nature
that we can use to create the basis of a new production system,
which is less impactant, more rational and more efficient.
We can observe the design, totally healthy leaves
and the reason is the focus here, we do not put too much focus on the crop.
The focus is in the environment and in the ecosystem as a whole.
The result of that is the ecosystem itself takes care of the crop.
We don't fertilize the crop.
We feed the soil life and then it takes care of the cane,
about its nutrition and its immunological system.
And we don't have one eaten part, one bite, no problems
and no disease in our cane, in 20,000 hectares.
Ecosystem revitalizing agriculture is an agriculture,
but at the same time provides all conditions for the crop growth
with no plagues and diseases problems,
but at the same time
providing to the environment the most important environmental services,
like preserving the water,
improving and keeping soil fertility,
bringing back the fauna biodiversity
and absorbing carbon from other activities of the economy.
One of the most interesting results
of implementing the revitalizing agriculture
is the radical change of the soil structure.
It was recovered in a such high level
that the soils are even reaching
a soil fertility class higher than we had in the world
before men started disturbing the environment.
This is a naturally structured rich soil,
and it retains four times more water than a conventional soil,
in a way that we produce 20% above conventional production
without any irrigation.
And the best thing is that this soil helps the water lifecycle.
It has the capacity of infiltrating and storing water in six times
in a way that the water is enough for the crop, to evaporate,
to be transferred to the clouds and also to supply the aquifer.
Some measurements showed that the fresh water here,
in the farms, streams and rivers increased 30%.
Besides becoming more fertile and providing much better yields,
the soil was rebuilt by the activity of fungus, bacteria
and hundreds of different species of insects.
and it now presents a resilience.
Recently researchers discovered
that the fungus act as a natural Internet in the soils.
They are translators of the different ways of communication
among vegetables, bacterias insects and so on.
Ninety percent of the machinery didn't fit in what we were doing,
so we started studying what were the soil demands.
Then we started customizing here, in our workshop,
with our mechanics and electricians,
equipments like tillers and harvesters.
In order to provide and guarantee that this soil is biodiversity friendly
our harvesters are equipped with metal tracks
which pressure over the soil is 9 psi.
In the same way, those trucks are equipped with ultra-high rotation tires.
We choose about 20 psi of pressure.
This guarantees the soil is not going to be compacted
and that under the stretch there will be enough comfort level
for all life forms which promotes the soil rebuilt.
While the machine harvest the cane,
it spreads 20 tonnes of trash over the field,
twenty tonnes of trash per hectare in a year.
And this trash provides soil comfort for the life forms
which reconstructs the soil.
The production model is pretty much closed and circular.
We harvest the cane, take it to the mill, where it's processed,
then we have the production of alcohol, sugar, electricity and so on.
Then we take back all the organic waste products.
We take them back to the field and they are used to feed the life forms.
So, in a way we have a closed cycle,
and nothing is lost.
Here we can see another important stage of the management.
We are seeing vinasse's application.
Vinasse is a very important organic fertilizer
and we use the vinesse, which is rich in organic matter and nutrients
to boost the soil and life forms activity.
Here we integrate sophisticated harvesting technologies
with natural practices.
This is the current concept of modernity for me, not the opposite.
We don't need to have everything artificial, synthetic or electronic.
Our production environment became a lot more resilient.
The weather has been much more unpredictable than it used to be before,
but now we can get more tonnes of cane
per millimeter of rain.
Compared to 30 years ago, we more than doubled,
and compared to 10 years ago the efficiency increased in 15%.
One of the main concerns when we started was how we would measure the results.
and then I went after idoneus institutions
like Embrapa, University of São Paulo, University of Campinas,
and I looked for specialized people in soil fertility, fauna biodiversity,
water resources, atmosphere, CO2 release and so on.
We have lots of publications and studies about how the soil fertility evolved here,
how biodiversity evolved here, and so on.
Just as an example, after a whole year of organic production,
besides compensating all our releases,
we extracted 45,000 tonnes of co2 from other economic activities.
So we are not just just carbon neutral, we are carbon sink.
We do not analyze water and soil anymore, because the ecologists taught me
that the best way to compare the results
is using biological indicators.
For instance, we have some insects and some animals here
that are extremely demanding in terms of environment comfort.
We have 340 species of superior vertebrates,
mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians,
which means more than 50% of the natural parks in São Paulo state.
And these are astonishing news,
because they break the scientific paradigm
that monoculture is bad for biodiversity.
What is bad for biodiversity is the management,
the way you do, and not what you plant.
The soil change was not the last thing that happened here, it was the first,
but one of the last things was how the soil change
and this different agriculture method impacted the business model.
Since the first day, 19 years ago,
when we started to sell our certified products, we never have a loss
There were profits every year,
because the price is constructed over the basis of the sustainability.
In order to define the prices,
we consider how much costs the social, the environmental
and economic aspects of this business.
This is a total different relationship
among all the actors participating in the value chain,
from the grower to the industrial food manufacturer,
because in conventional food chains
what happens is the gross margin
remain 90% of the grow margin,
with that actor which keeps the key resource of the food chain.
Sometimes it's the logistic, or the financial capital,
sometimes it's the clients and so on.
But in sustainable food chain or value chain,
this margin is more equitably distributed along the chain,
because this connection happens.
Surely we can't apply it instantly in nine million hectares of sugarcane,
but the same principles can be applied
to other crops, charts, planted forests and so on.
The system has not a recipe like in the conventional,
where there's a pack you must use.
You can do it in thousands of different ways,
because you are talking about natural principles.
If you observe the nature,
you are going to see thousands of different ways of doing it,
reaching the same objectives, vegetable and animal production.
I think that the biggest difficulty is not teaching people
how to do one operation, the change and so on.
I think that the challenge is how to change people's mind,
because men emancipated themselves from the natural rhythms,
so we lost a big important part of ourselves,
which is the capacity of perceiving ourselves in the environment.
The nature is teaching us the lessons we didn't have before,
and we must learn very quickly
that there is an intelligence coordinating what happens in the nature.
We have to convince all people,
no matter if they are organic producers or conventional producers,
to have a more systemic vision
of the whole, of the farm,
of the business and especially about the role
of the human being in this planet.
My long-term vision for this production method
considers a consciousness expansion.
What we did in 20,000 hectares is just the tip of the iceberg.
I foresee that we can, for instance, take back, switch garbage
from the big cities to the agriculture ecosystem.
And in the same way we did here, we can feed the life of the soil
with all the waste products of the cities,
closing the cycle, turning it circular.
I foresee a wide range of application, because since is based on a principle,
we can find housands of different ways of getting the same result.